Vice President Mike Pence said Otto Warmbier was "on all our hearts" amid the "joy" over the return of three Americans who had been imprisoned in North Korea.
The vice president told CBS on Thursday that he reached out to the family of Warmbier, a student who was savagely beaten during his imprisonment in North Korea and later died in the U.S., amid the whirlwind of bringing home Kim Dong Chul, Kim Hak Song and Tony Kim.
"I simply let them know that while we receive this news with joy, that Otto was on all of our hearts, and their family was in our prayers. We got Otto home last year, but it wasn't soon enough and we lost him," Pence told CBS "This Morning" about his conversation with the Warmbier family.
Pence was asked about other families of prisoners in Iran who now fear the same fate as Warmbier in the aftermath of President Donald Trump's decision earlier this week to withdraw from the nuclear accord with the terrorist nation.
"We felt it was important to withdraw from this deeply flawed Iran nuclear deal, but now we're engaging on the possibility of a new deal which may create opportunities for not only addressing issues of Americans that are detained in Iran, but also checking the extraordinary malign influence and support for terrorism that Iran continues to propagate across the region," Pence told CBS.
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