Trump walked away from North Korea deal because he 'didn't want to make the ...

Donald Trump walked away from a so called 'bad deal' with North Korea because he 'didn't want to make the same mistake Obama did with Iran', according to press secretary Sarah Sanders.

The White House issued their first statement after North Korean officials made a rare appearance on Thursday — while the president was on his way home from Vietnam — to publicly rebuke him for the breakdown in nuclear talks.

The president looked downbeat as he landed back into Joint Base Andrews in Maryland this evening local time after the summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un was abruptly ended early without signing a deal. 

Sanders tweeted: 'President Obama refused to walk away from a bad deal with Iran. President @realDonaldTrump refuses to make the same mistake with Iran, North Korea, or anybody else. President Trump will always put the safety of the American people above politics.'  

The nation that tightly controls the media its people consume and does not have any independent news agencies, allowed two top officials to appear before cameras. One of the officials even took questions in Korean after acknowledging an American reporter in English.   

It was a slap in the face to Trump, who'd boasted about his 'great relationship' with Kim Jong-un at a news conference and cast North Korea as 'not ready' to make a deal that he could sign.

'Basically they wanted the sanctions lifted in their entirety and we couldn’t do that,' Trump asserted.

In a long statement delivered to the press in Korean, and a translator read aloud in English for Americans watching over lunch, North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho contradicted Trump hours later at a midnight news conference.

He said the country asked for 'partial sanctions' relief in areas the authoritarian country claims are harming North Korean citizens and affecting their livelihoods. In return, Pyongyang offered to 'permanently' close its Plutonium and Uranium facilities in the Yongbyon region in the presence of U.S. inspectors. 

He said North Korea asked the U.S. to lift sanctions corresponding with five United Nations resolutions adopted between 2016 and 2017. Ri claimed that his proposal was the 'biggest' offer North Korea could make based on the 'current level of confidence' between the country and the United States.

Trump claimed Thursday that North Korea was 'not ready' to meet the United States' conditions. Ri said talks broke down when the United States 'insisted that we should take one more step' beyond the pledge to abandon Yongbyon. 

'Therefore it became crystal clear that the United States was not ready to accept our proposal,' he stated.

The U.S. president expressed confidence that an accord could be struck in the future that would see North Korea denuclearize, but Ri told reporters an opportunity to make a better agreement may not present itself: 'Our principle stand will remain variably and our proposal will never be changed.' 

Ri left the media availability without taking questions. His deputy Choe Son-hui did interact with press, and took a question in English from an NBC reporter on Otto Warmbier. 

Choe declined to comment on the Ohio college student's death, however, telling a rowdy group of reporters she would only talk about denuclearization. 

She proceeded to answer questions in Korean for three and a half more minutes before she left the scrum at Melia Hotel in Hanoi that took place nearly ten hours after the summit concluded.

Trump speculated at his own presser that 'top leadership' in North Korea did not know about the Warmbier's arrest and the student's deteriorating condition. He claimed it wasn't to Kim's 'advantage' to send the young man, who'd been accused of taking down a propaganda poster, back to the U.S. in a coma. 

'He tells me that he didn’t know about it, and I will take him at his word,' the American president said.

Trump spoke to the press for roughly 40 minutes about his failure to get a deal before flying back to the U.S.,where he touched down just before 2 pm EDT at a base in Alaska.

The president made no mention of Kim in remarks he delivered there to troops, opting for a traditional stump speech on the military, economy and trade, instead. 

White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters riding on Air Force One that the U.S. was aware of North Korea's claims. She had no statement to share at the time in response to the country's shocking comments.

Trump had already spoken about his decision to walk away from his North Korean nuclear summit without a deal not just at the news conference, but in a interview from Vietnam with Fox News host Sean Hannity, as well. 

The president told Hannity he wasn't 'satisfied' with the outcome of talks, and he suspects that Kim 'wasn't satisfied,' either. He suggested that they left as pals, though, and could someday resume the discussion.

'We’re working towards something, but we didn’t sign anything today, it didn’t quite work out,' he told Hannity on Thursday afternoon local time. 'Good relationship, but I decided this wasn’t the right time to sign something so we’ll see what happens over a period of time.' 

The dictator demanded that all sanctions be lifted in return for giving up only some of his nukes, the U.S. president claimed.

'They wanted to de-nuke certain areas, and I wanted everything. And the sanctions are there and I didn’t want to give up the sanctions unless we had a real program,' he told Hannity. 'And they’re not ready for that and I understand that fully, I really do.' 

Trump said that the final snag that caused the sudden breakdown was over sanctions — and Kim's push to have all of them lifted in exchange for a concession Trump and his secretary of state could not live with.  

'Sometimes you have to walk away,' Trump told reporters at a press conference in Hanoi that was abruptly moved up after the stalled talks. 

The president expressed his hope that the two leaders would meet again, but acknowledged: 'It might be soon, it might not be for a long time. I can’t tell you.'

At home, the president received the usual cheering from Republicans like South Carolina's Lindsey Graham.

Graham suggested that Kim's days will be numbered if he can't come to an agreement with Trump. 

'Speaking of Rocket Man, he couldn't be here. And if he doesn't get a deal with Trump he won't be anywhere much longer,' the U.S. senator said to laughs at a large-scale conservative gathering just outside of Washington. 'Why is Rocket Man talking to Trump when he's never talked to anybody else? Because he knows Trump means business.' 

Democrats mocked the summit as 'amateur hour' — with Speaker Nancy Pelosi touting Kim the 'big winner' for getting the president to sit down and negotiate. 

'I guess it took two meetings for him to realize that Kim Jong Un is not on the level,' Pelosi told reporters at the U.S. Capitol. 'He was a big winner, Kim Jong Un, in getting to sit face-to-face with the most powerful person in the world - the president of the United States.'  

Other Democratic lawmakers said they were not surprised that the Republican president — whose claim to fame is his deal-making skills — could not get Kim to agree the United States' preconditions for sanctions relief. 

They called the summit a 'failure' and the president who orchestrated it 'naive' for believing that the authoritarian leader would ever hand over his nuclear arsenal.  

'I'm not surprised it ended in failure. Trump just does not know what he's doing,' Congressman Brendan Boyle told DailyMail.com. 'We have gotten absolutely nothing out of these two bilateral summits, other than a photo op.'

Congressman Ruben Gallego, a member on the House Armed Services Committee, said the administration is either 'naive or so desperate for a deal' that it was willing to offer North Korea 'something for nothing' to get to this point in talks.

'North Korea does not intend to denuclearize,' he told DailyMail.com. 'It shows either the administration is naive or so desperate for a deal that they would go down this path.' 

Rep. Jim Clyburn, the number three House Democrat, told DailyMail.com as Trump flew back to the United States: 'I don't think anybody expected the president to get a deal out of that. I don't know what he was thinking.'

Some legislators signaled relief that Trump had walked away, knowing what was on the table.  

'In some ways this might be the best possible realistic outcome from my perspective because I was nervous President Trump would make an agreement that would be far worse than just a failed summit,' Boyle said.

One Democratic lawmaker, who asked to speak to the DailyMail.com on background, said,' I guess no deal is better than a bad deal.'

The lawmaker added what really concerned him were the president's comments on Otto Warmbier, the American student sent to a work camp who came back to the U.S. in a comma and died several days later.

'I was blown away by the president's quote about Otto Warmbier. That the president would defend Kim Jong-un and his regime I thought was incredible,' the lawmaker said.

The member of Congress said the second summit did not help Trump's reputation as a deal maker.

'I think he really hasn't done a deal with anybody,' the lawmaker said, adding: 'He tries to do things on his own. He's not really a deal maker. At least he hasn't shown that in politics.'

New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand also said she was 'disappointed' that Trump's summit did not have a more productive conclusion. 

'I'm grateful, however, that he is focused on diplomacy and a political solution with North Korea, as opposed to a military one,' she said. 'I just would hope that he would, perhaps, engage with our allies and South Korea more, so that we can reach a more productive solution.'    

Trouble was brewing for Trump on multiple fronts as he flew back to the U.S. on Thursday. His longtime fixer, Michael Cohen, claimed in

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