Trump-Kim summit: US president blames failure of talks on North Korea's demand for sanctions to be dropped
Follow the latest updates on the historic meeting
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Your support makes all the difference.Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un have cut short their talks in Hanoi, Vietnam and skipped a scheduled lunch event.
The White House confirmed the summit had ended with “no agreement reached” as the leaders headed back to their respective hotels.
The US president talks broke down over North Korea’s demands on US-led sanctions.
“Basically, they wanted the sanctions lifted in their entirety, but we couldn’t do that,” he told reporters. “Sometimes you have to walk.”
Sarah Sanders, the White House press secretary, said negotiations would continue at a future date.
Several Democrats came out acknowledging Mr Trump’s decision to walk away without a deal was the right move in this situation. Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff said walking away with no deal was better than agreeing to a bad deal, before adding that it was “the result of a poorly planned strategy.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer echoed similar statements, citing his concerns about the likelihood of a bad deal forming out of the summit.
“A deal that fell short of complete denuclearization would have only made North Korea stronger & the world less safe,” Mr Schumer said.
After the summit, Mr Trump also defended Mr Kim over the tragic death of American college student Otto Warmbier, who was jailed in North Korea in December 2015 for attempting to steal propaganda material during an organised tour.The president said he does not believe the autocratic leader was aware of Mr Warmbier’s condition in the North Korean hard labour prison camp.
"He tells me he didn't know about it, and I will take him at his word,” Mr Trump said.
After two years of imprisonment, North Korean authorities returned Mr Warbier to the US in a coma in July 2017. A few days later, the 22-year-old died in his hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio.
Ohio Senators Sherrod Brown and Rob Portman criticised the American president’s defense of Mr Kim.
“I’m very concerned that the President didn’t seem to be all that concerned about the murder of Otto Warmbier from Cincinnati,” Mr Brown told reporters on Thursday. “I don’t know how he says he likes the dictator of NK so much.”
Mr Portman insists that Mr Trump and the American people must remember Mr Warmbier and that “we should never let North Korea off the hook for what they did to him."
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Trump says he failed to reach agreement with Kim due to North Korean demands to lift punishing US-led sanctions.
"Basically, they wanted the sanctions lifted in their entirety, but we couldn't do that ... we had to walk away from it," he tells reporters.
We've just had a brief detour onto the topic of Michael Cohen, after Trump was asked about his former lawyer's testimony before a House committee yesterday.
“He lied a lot,” says Trump, describing Cohen's testimony as a "fake hearing".
But he claims Cohen "didn’t lie about one thing, he said no collusion with the Russian hoax, and he could have lied about that.”
Yesterday, Cohen described the president as “a racist, a conman and a cheat”.
Trump says North Korea has promised not to resume nuclear and missile testing, despite talks breaking down today.
Trump said he and Kim have not committed to another summit, as things stand.
Earlier, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the two countries' negotiators "look forward to meeting in the future".
But Trump says that "might not be soon. It might not be for a long time."
Trump has been asked whether he confronted Kim about the death of Otto Warmbier, the US student who died after falling seriously ill in North Korean custody.
The US president says he "did speak to him, he knew about it, but he knew about it after".
He adds: "I really believe something very bad happened to him and I don’t believe the top leadership knew about it.
“I don’t believe that [Kim] would have allowed that to happen."
Trump blames previous administrations for talks between the US and North Korea breaking down.
“It should have been done by many presidents before me, he says. “But I’m not blaming the Obama administration, I’m blaming many administrations.”
Trump has ended the press conference in Hanoi and will now travel back to Washington DC.
Trump took only one question about Michael Cohen's testimony during that press conference - largely due to him avoiding the White House press corps.
North Korea experts seem mostly unsurprised that the Trump-Kim talks in Hanoi broke down with a agreement, according to initial reactions on Twitter.
Leonid Petrov, an academic at the Australian National University, says there was "a yawning chasm between the expectations and bitter reality", while MIT political science professor Vipin Narang says the US had been "papering over differences to get to Hanoi".
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