A negotiator involved in attempts to rescue American hostage Otto Warmbier from North Korea has claimed that his proposal to help President Donald Trump secure the student’s release before his inauguration went nowhere.
Mickey Bergman, who was involved in backchannel negotiations with North Korea during the Obama administration, told GQ that he approached the Trump transition team but never heard back.
Bergman, a former Israeli paratrooper, said he was inspired by the Iran hostage crisis ending just minutes after Ronald Reagan’s inauguration, and felt there was a similar opportunity to bring Warmbier home in a blaze of glory on the Trump plane between the 2016 election and Trump’s inauguration.
‘The challenge that we had was that we could not get Donald Trump,’ Bergman told the magazine. ‘We tried to go through Giuliani, Pence, Ivanka. Nothing during the transition. I’m assuming they were in chaos over there. I don’t think it ever crossed his desk, because I think he would have actually liked it.’
Otto Warmbier is seen being escorted from his trial in Pyongyang on March 16, 2016, within a day before being hospitalized with brain damage according to a new report
Negotiator Mickey Bergman (left) is seen with Joe Biden. Bergman says he hatched a plan for the Trump transition team to bring Warmbier home but got no response from the team
‘We tried to go through Giuliani, Pence, Ivanka,’ Bergman said. Pictured left to right in a file photo are Vice President Mike Pence, Ivanka Trump, and Jared Kushner
The White House press office did not immediately respond to a message from DailyMail.com on Friday night seeking comment on Bergman’s statements.
It’s not clear from Bergman’s account whether his proposal ever got through to transition officials, such as Vice President Mike Pence, Rudy Giuliani, and Ivanka Trump.
What is known is that soon after Trump’s inauguration, his newly appointed special representative for North Korea, Joseph Yun, took over the negotiations, which had stalled completely under the Obama administration.
Warmbier was released in June 2017 in a vegetative state, and died less than a week after his return to Cincinnati.
Bergman’s role was as an unofficial backchannel during a period where Pyongyang had shut off communication with the Obama administration.
An aide to former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, who leads a non-profit that specializes in under-the-radar ‘fringe diplomacy’ to release hostages, Bergman met with North Korea’s UN representatives in New York regularly from February 2016 to August 2016.
Warmbier cries at court in an undisclosed location in North Korea on March 16, 2016. Doctors say he was hospitalized unresponsive with massive brain injuries the following day
Richardson said that shortly after Warmbier’s trial on March 16, 2016, the North Korean delegation appeared to have their information about the case shut off from Pyongyang.
He now believes that timing coincided with the injury that left Warmbier vegetative, an insight that corresponds with other new information in the GQ report.
Michael Flueckiger, one of the team of doctors who traveled to North Korea to bring Warmbier home, told the magazine that the American was hospitalized on the morning after his trial.
‘The staff at Friendship Hospital said they received Otto the morning after the trial and that when he came in he was unresponsive,’ Flueckiger said.
‘They had to resuscitate him, then give him oxygen and put him on a ventilator, or he would die.’
Trump’s negotiators secured Warmbier’s release in June 2017, five months into his term. He is seen above meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un last month
That information led reporter Doug Bock Clark to theorize that Warmbier had attempted suicide soon after learning that he had been sentenced to 15 years of hard labor for his crime, the removal of a propaganda poster from a Pyongyang hotel.
Though doctors have been unable to determine how Warmbier’s brain was damaged, they have said that the damage appeared most consistent with prolonged oxygen deprivation.
If Warmbier did suffer his injuries in March 2016, as the new information suggests, then Bergman’s plan to negotiate his release between the 2016 election and Trump’s inauguration would not have prevented the brain damage that ultimately killed the American.