Trusts Kim's 'word'......

Trump trusts Kim's 'word' that he was unaware of Otto Warmbier mistreatment

'I don't believe that he would have allowed that to happen — it just wasn’t to his advantage to allow that,' the president said.

By CAITLIN OPRYSKO

President Donald Trump on Thursday said he trusted North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's assurance that he was unaware of the circumstances leading to the 2017 death of Otto Warmbier, the American student imprisoned by North Korea.

"He tells me he didn't know about it, and I will take him at his word," Trump said at a press conference held at the end of a two-day nuclear summit in Vietnam.

Warmbier was a student at the University of Virginia when he was arrested in 2016 while on a trip to North Korea. He was accused of stealing a propaganda poster from his hotel and sentenced to 15 years of hard labor following a sham trial. In June 2017, after months of lobbying, Warmbier was returned to the U.S. But he was in a vegetative state and died soon after.

Trump said Thursday that he didn't believe Kim — whose regime is accused of a laundry list of human rights violations — would have ordered the mistreatment of Warmbier.

“What happened is horrible. I really believe something really bad happened to him and I don't think the top leadership knew about it,” the president told reporters after his second summit with Kim, adding that “I did speak about it and I don't believe that he would have allowed that to happen — it just wasn’t to his advantage to allow that to happen.”

He later doubled down on Kim’s denial and said that he trusted Kim was telling the truth.

“He felt badly about it. I did speak to him, he felt very badly.” Trump said. “He knew the case very well but knew it later. And you know, you've got a lot of people, a big country, and in those prisons and those camps you have a lot of people and some really bad things happened to Otto, some really, really bad things."

Since his overtures to North Korea began, Trump has caught heat for his reluctance to pressure Pyongyang over human rights violations like Warmbier’s detainment. Earlier in the day on Thursday, the president insisted that the two leaders were “discussing everything" during the summit, including human rights.

But his comments Thursday were still remarkable, especially in light of his rhetoric on the situation in the past.

In September 2017, a few months after Warmbier’s death, Trump praised Warmbier’s parents for an interview they gave to Fox News. “Otto was tortured beyond belief by North Korea,” he wrote in a tweet.

And in his State of the Union address last year, Trump invited the Warmbier family to sit in his gallery as he decried the “depraved character” of Kim's regime, saying that Warmbier’s story exemplified “a menace that threatens our world.”

Thursday’s comments were not the first time Trump has publicly accepted denial of wrongdoing by an American adversary.

Following a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin last year, Trump similarly said he took Putin at his word when he denied interfering in the 2016 presidential election, despite U.S. intelligence agencies concluding that he had orchestrated a massive effort. Trump has also vacillated about whether Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the murder of a Saudi journalist living in the U.S., even though the CIA concluded that the crown prince was behind the assassination, according to multiple news reports.