Trump criticized for defending Kim Jong Un over death of Otto Warmbier
The North Korean leader "tells me that he didn’t know about it and I will take him at his word," the president said.
President Donald Trump has defended North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in the death of Otto Warmbier, a 22-year-old American student who was imprisoned there and died days after returning to the United States in a vegetative state in June 2017.
“He felt badly about it. I did speak about it, and I don’t believe that he would have allowed that to happen,” Trump told reporters during a news conference Thursday following the abbreviated summit in Hanoi, Vietnam. “He tells me that he didn’t know about it, and I will take him at his word.”
Trump added, “Those prisons are rough, and bad things happen, but I really don’t believe he knew about it.”
Trump’s comments defending Kim were widely criticized Thursday morning. CNN chief national security correspondent Jim Sciutto, who was covering the summit in Vietnam, called it “truly remarkable” that Trump would “run cover for Kim on Otto Warmbier.” Rep. Adam Schiff (D., Calif.), one of the president’s most outspoken critics, called his defense of Kim “detestable.”
“He seems to find warmth with authoritarian dictatorships, and believes them and their word when they have records of violating international law and human rights rather than to believe our own intelligence community," Sen. Bob Menendez (D., N.J.) said in a statement.
Trump’s comments were also called out by Nikki Haley, his former U.N. ambassador, who wrote on Twitter that “Americans know the cruelty that was placed on Otto Warmbier by the North Korean regime.”
Senior CNN analyst Rick Santorum, a former Republican Pennsylvania senator and an outspoken supporter of the president, was among those harshly criticizing Trump’s comments about Warmbier.
“This is reprehensible, what he just did,” Santorum said on CNN’s New Day. “He gave cover, as you just said, to a leader who knew very well what was going on with Otto Warmbier. I don’t understand why the president does this. I am disappointed, to say the least, that he did it.”
Trump’s defense of the North Korean leader echoed his repeated backing of Russian President Vladimir Putin despite assessments from U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia interfered during the 2016 presidential election.
"Every time he sees me, he says, 'I didn’t do that,’ “ Trump said during a news conference alongside Putin following a meeting in Helsinki, Finland, last year. “I really believe that when he tells me that, he means it.”
Trump was also widely criticized by fellow Republicans when he said he believed Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who claims to have no involvement in the murder of Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi in October.
“Why such generous assessments of dubious claims by geopolitical opponents or those deeply implicated in bad activity?” wrote Post national correspondent Philip Bump. “Because, it seems, Trump believes that his personal relationship with those leaders is the best route to getting what he wants in his interactions with them.”
According to the United Nations, North Korea is among the world’s worst abusers of human rights, including committing crimes such as murder, enslavement, torture, false imprisonment, and prolonged starvation.
“The unspeakable atrocities that are being committed against inmates of the political prison camps resemble the horrors of camps that totalitarian states established during the 20th century," a 2014 U.N. commission report stated.
Warmbier, a University of Virginia student, was arrested and sentenced to 15 years of hard labor after being accused of removing a propaganda banner from a hotel during a visit to Pyongyang in January 2016. He was returned to the U.S. in June 2017 after having spent 17 months in custody, but in a state known as “unresponsive wakefulness.” He died two days later.
"We need only look at the depraved character of the North Korean regime to understand the nature of the nuclear threat it could pose to America and our allies,” Trump said during his first State of the Union speech, six months after Warmbier’s death. Warmbier’s parents were in the audience, watching from Melania Trump’s box.
"You are powerful witnesses to a menace that threatens our world, and your strength inspires us all,” Trump said to Warmbier’s parents. “Tonight, we pledge to honor Otto’s memory with total American resolve.”
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