President Trump on Friday said the United States did not pay North Korea any amount of money for the return of Otto Warmbier.
North Korea, The Washington Post reported on Thursday, presented the U.S. in 2017 with a $2 million bill for Warmbier's hospital care after a State Department official went to retrieve the detained American student. Warmbier had been comatose for 15 months by then and died shortly after returning to the United States.
This U.S. envoy, the Post reported, signed an agreement saying the U.S. would pay this $2 million bill, but it was unclear whether the bill ended up being paid. Trump on Friday denied that it was.
Trump did not deny the underlying report that North Korea presented the United States with a bill and that the U.S. said it would pay it, though. The Post had reported that this order to sign the agreement was passed down directly from Trump, and Warmbier's father in response said this sounded like "ransom."
Trump later in the morning tweeted a quote from a "hostage negotiator" praising him as the "greatest hostage negotiator that I know of in the history of the United States" but did not cite a source.