North Korea denounces U.S. during Olympics charm offensive

Kim regime upset that Otto Warmbier’s father was guest of VP Pence

Tokyo — Fred Warmbier clearly struck a nerve in North Korea when he traveled to South Korea last week to remind the world, amid an Olympic-inspired detente, of the horrors of the Kim regime.

The regime has again insisted that Otto Warmbier, the University of Virginia student who was detained in North Korea for 17 months, most of it in a coma, and died shortly afterward, was nothing but a “criminal.”

“The United States is again kicking up a defamation campaign against the DPRK, intentionally attributing Warmbier’s death to the latter,” an official in the North Korean Foreign Ministry’s Institute for American Studies was quoted as saying Friday, using the abbreviation for the state’s official name.

Vice President Mike Pence invited Fred Warmbier to accompany him in South Korea, where he was attending the opening of the Winter Olympics.

“I’m telling the truth about the regime’s treatment of my son. But guess what, they do this to countless other people,” Warmbier said in an interview with NBC News. “This isn’t defiance. This is telling the truth. This is standing up and being the voice of Otto.”

North Korea launched a charm offensive related to the Olympics, sending 22 athletes to the Games but also dispatching hundreds of cheerleaders and musicians.

North Korea clearly did not appreciate Warmbier’s efforts, or the broader efforts by the Trump administration, to remind the world of its rampant human rights abuses just as it was trying to paper over them.

The Trump administration was trying to “tarnish” its international image by talking about Otto Warmbier’s death, the unnamed official said.