Texas “whiz kid” Ahmed Mohamed got to meet the president when he visited the White House on Monday for its second astronomy night, despite cold water being thrown on the possibility earlier in the day.

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest had told reporters that he didn’t think Obama would have time to meet with the teen at the event.

Last Wednesday, Ahmed met with Sudanese president and war criminal Omar al-Bashir, causing some to speculate that the president might want to distance himself from a boy who is friendly with a genocidal maniac.

As luck would have it, young Ahmed was in the third row of the audience when the president showed up to peer though a telescope and make his brief remarks.

“We have to encourage those glimmers of curiosity,” Obama said during his speech, not mentioning Ahmed by name.

According to the New York Times, Ahmed made his way to the front of the crowd after the president’s speech, and Obama spoke briefly with the teen and gave him a hug.

The Wochit News report and most other news reports I’ve been seeing on the net about Ahmed Mohamed’s travels have stuck with the original false narrative — that Mohamed was detained because teachers mistook his cool “invention” or “homemade clock” for a bomb. That is incorrect. Authorities knew that Ahmed had brought a hastily made “clock” to school. The question was, why? They thought the suspicious-looking contraption looked like a “hoax bomb.”