Early this morning Stateside (or this afternoon Hanoi time), the anti-American tyrant-worshipping Autocrat-in-Chief Donald Trump decided to coddle yet another autocratic dictator, this time by defending Kim Jong-Un over the treatment of Otto Warmbier at the hands of North Korea’s prison guards that later caused his death about a week after his return back to the USA in June 2017.
This is the same Warmbier that Trump has praised at the previous summit between him and KJU and the 2018 State Of The Union address.
Trump said he discussed the issue with Kim Jong Un, and said "I don't believe he would allow that to happen."
"Those prisons are rough, rough places, and bad things happen," he added. "I don't believe he knew about it, he felt badly about it, he felt very badly."
He added that while Kim "knew the case very well," he knew about it "later."
"Some really bad things happened to Otto," Trump said.
"(Kim) tells me he didn't know about it and I will take him at his word."
Associated Press, via Washington Post:
Trump has taken credit for freeing American prisoners abroad and used Warmbier’s death as a rallying cry against the North’s human rights abuses before softening his rhetoric before talks with Kim.
Warmbier, a University of Virginia student from Ohio, was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor in 2016 on suspicion of stealing a propaganda poster. He died in June 2017, shortly after being sent home in a coma.
His parents say he was tortured.
President Trump said Thursday North Korean leader Kim Jong Un told him that he did not know about Otto Warmbier's condition and Mr. Trump said "I will take him at his word." The American college student was imprisoned and sentenced to 15 years hard labor in 2016, but was returned to the U.S. in June 2017 in a coma after suffering severe brain damage. He died one week after returning to Ohio.
[...]
Mr. Trump had advocated for Warmbier's return, and he said Thursday that he "knew the Warmbier family very well and I think they are an incredible family." Warmbier was detained when he was about to return from a five-day visit to North Korea, and was convicted of stealing a propaganda poster.
Mr. Trump didn't elaborate further on his relationship with the Warmbier family and Kim Jong Un.
CNN’s Jim Sciutto was spot-on with this assessment on Twitter regarding Trump’s buddying up to KJU on Warmbier:
Pollster Matt McDermott nailed what Trump ceded to Kim Jong-Un on Twitter:
Matt Murphy has the game-winning buzzer-beating 3-point shot accurate Twitter take on Trump’s propping up of Kim at the expense of Warmbier:
This is purely disgraceful for him to do this tyrant-appeasing BS in Vietnam, which further injures the USA’s standing on the world stage under the Trump regime.
From CBS News’s coverage of the Trump/Kim Summit in Vietnam on 02.28.2019: