Here are more details about the online opinion scandal which is the current focus of South Korean politics:
This photo, taken April 16, 2018, shows Rep. Kim Kyoung-soo of the ruling Democratic Party speaking during a press conference at the National Assembly in Seoul.
A sprawling online opinion rigging scandal in South Korea is stirring up a heated debate over the morality of polemic writers, the credibility of cyberspace discourse and whether to restrain the online freedom of expression to curb politicking.
Over the past several days, the scandal involving an influential blogger, who goes by the alias Druking, has roiled politics with the ruling Democratic Party (DP) quickly severing ties with the former party member, and the rival parties suspecting its possible link to his alleged misdeeds.
On Tuesday, the prosecution indicted Druking, surnamed Kim, and two others for allegedly using a computer program in January to jack up the number of “likes” or “feel the same way” clicks for two comments critical of the liberal government on a news article carried by the online portal Naver.
The article was about the government’s decision to have the two Koreas form a joint women’s hockey team for the PyeongChang Winter Olympics in February. The trio are suspected of using 614 different IDs to increase the number of the clicks.
They reportedly told police that they wanted to make it look like conservatives manipulated the comments, as they tried to test the program, known to be often misused to rig rankings for most searched commercial products.
The case attracted keen political attention, following the revelations that DP Rep. Kim Kyoung-soo, one of the most trusted confidants of President Moon Jae-in, has known and communicated with the key suspect through meetings or social media since 2016.
Although the lawmaker denies any involvement, the revelations have triggered speculation that Druking, with a large following in cyberspace, could have rigged online opinions even in the lead-up to the 2017 May presidential election.
The suspicion was reinforced as Kim Kyoung-soo admitted that he came to know Druking since mid-2016, visited the blogger’s publishing firm upon request in the autumn that year and met him again before Moon’s presidential primary last year. [Yonhap]
You can read much more at the link, but the fact that a political party was leaving fake comments to manipulate public opinion is nothing new.
What is making this issue so newsworthy is that the Moon administration attacked the former conservative government for doing the same thing. The difference though is that the National Intelligence Service (NIS) chief was organizing people to leave fake comments while for this scandal a political operative for a campaign was organizing fake comments. This dynamic may have legal differences, but in the court of public opinion it is pretty clear that the Moon administration no longer has any creditability when it comes to complaining about online discourse.
Moon decided to use the word "nodong" instead of "geunro" to refer to labor in his constitutional revision bill. "Geunro" means "diligent or faithful" labor. Working faithfully for whom? https://t.co/53OXKXpf3i
The Korean left is likely rejoicing today with the news that they have finally gotten payback on former President Lee Myung-Bak for uncovering the corruption of former President Roh Moo-hyun:
Former President Lee Myung-bak was taken into custody by prosecutors after a local court issued a warrant Thursday night to detain him as a suspect in a criminal investigation over corruption allegations.
Lee, who served as president from 2008 to 2013, became the fourth former president to be detained on corruption charges.
He faces at least 18 charges for receiving bribes from businessmen and politicians, misappropriating secret operations funds from the country’s main spy agency and generating slush funds using a company registered under his family’s name.
After the Seoul Central District Court issued the warrant around 11:05 p.m. on Thursday, prosecutors went to his home in Nonhyeon-dong, southern Seoul, and transported Lee to the Seoul Dongbu Detention Center in Munjeong-dong, southern Seoul.
Earlier in the day, Judge Park Beom-seok reviewed the prosecution’s application for a detention warrant, which was submitted on Monday. Judge Park made the decision after reviewing documents from prosecutors and Lee’s lawyers. A hearing was not held because Lee refused to attend.
Prosecutors questioned the former president on March 14 and asked the court to issue a detention warrant for further investigation because they believed there was a high possibility of evidence destruction. Lee, they argued, might try to persuade witnesses to change their testimony. [Joong Ang Ilbo]
You can read more at the link, but this could also be payback for the prison term that former Prime Minister during the Roh administration, Han Myeong-sook received for corruption. This is just another example that politics in South Korea is a zero sum game.
It will be interesting to see what President Moon has to say about this considering that An Hee-jung was looked at as a possible successor to Moon in the next Presidential election:
An Hee-jung
South Chungcheong Province Governor An Hee-jung has been accused of repeatedly sexually assaulting his secretary over the past eight months.
During a TV interview on JTBC, a local cable channel, Monday, Kim Ji-eun who has served as An’s secretary since June, claimed that the 54-year-old assaulted her four times and frequently sexually harassed her.
He has reportedly admitted to having sexual relations with her, but insists they were consensual.
Kim said she will file a complaint with the prosecution Tuesday.
The shocking news of his behavior could bring about the end of his political career regardless of the nature of their relationship. An was regarded as one of the strongest hopefuls for the country’s next president.
“Our sexual relations were not consensual, and I’m sure he knows it,” Kim said. “I was not in a position where I could say no.”
She said there was no one that could help her.
The accusation comes amid the spread of the #MeToo movement here, which was triggered by female prosecutor Seo Ji-hyun in January.
“After the issue about the movement came into the spotlight, An appeared to be anxious,” Kim said. “On Feb. 25, he called me into his office and apologized. But then, he did it again … I thought I would never be able to get away from him at that time.” [Korea Times]
You can read more at the link, but I would not be surprised if this is something An has been doing for years and Kim Ji-eun just happens to be the first person to speak out against him.
Kim Ji-eun speaks out during an interview on JTBC on Monday. / Captured from JTBC
It just seems to me that someone who is a failed nuclear negotiator with North Korea partly responsible for the current mess the United States is in; probably should not be the lecturing the current Trump administration on how to handle this issue:
This file photo shows former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Christopher Hill. (Yonhap)
A former senior U.S. diplomat slammed the Donald Trump administration Wednesday for what he called a lack of recognition of the South Korea-U.S. alliance in the face of North Korea’s growing nuclear threat.
Christopher Hill, who served in the 2000s as Washington’s chief envoy to the six-party talks on North Korea’s nuclear program, said he would like to see a greater commitment from the administration toward the alliance.
“This is not about a series of transactions. This is about a relationship that has served us well, and served the Republic of Korea well,” he said during a forum on the North Korean threat, referring to South Korea by its official name.
If Washington can provide such reassurances to Seoul, “that gives us more scope to really go after the North Koreans,” Hill said.
Trump has often linked security cooperation with trade issues. He has pressured South Korea to address its trade surplus with the U.S. and shoulder a larger burden of the cost of stationing American troops there. [Yonhap]
You can read more at the link, but Mr. Hill’s also wants the Trump administration to do more to get China to denuclearize North Korea.
Keep the name Im Jong-seok and his background in mind over the next year as South Korea likely moves forward with appeasement Sunshine 2.0 with the Kim regime:
President Moon Jae-in’s chief of staff, Im Jong-seok, left, fires back at opposition lawmaker Jun Hee-kyung, who raised questions about his ideological background. [YONHAP]I knew very little about Im Jong-seok until he became President Moon Jae-in’s chief of staff in May. All I knew was that as president of the National Council of Student Representatives, he served a prison term for orchestrating his fellow student Lim Su-kyung’s unauthorized trip to North Korea in 1989.
The council had been influenced by Kim Il Sung’s Juche idea of self-reliance and supported North Korean ideas like the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Korea, abolishing the National Security Law and achieving unification with North Korea based on a federal system. Therefore, it might be natural that some people consider the president’s chief of staff as a former Juche activist since he had been the head of a pro-North group. I thought so, too. If the public is wrong, it is up to Im, as a public official and politician, to set the record straight.
It was a surprise to me that Im responded fiercely when Juche was debated during the National Assembly’s audit of the Blue House on Nov. 6. Jun Hee-kyung, a lawmaker from the opposition Liberty Korea Party lawmaker, brought up the issue and said she saw the Blue House being dominated by Juche supporters and National Council of Student Representatives alumni.
The opposition party’s attack might have been expected, but Im questioned Jun’s motivations in the inquiry. “I don’t know how you lived during the Fifth and Sixth Republic juntas when soldiers-turned-politicians infringed democracy,” Im fired back.
But that was it. I wonder why Im let go of such a great opportunity. If he had said, “I never supported Juche and believe in liberal democracy; how can you say I support Kim Il Sung’s philosophy?,” all doubts could be cleared. But he did not.
So I traced his past and found many aspects of an emotional North Korea sympathizer. [Joong Ang Ilbo]
The always interesting B.R. Myers has an interesting essay posted about the role the Lee Myung-bak conservative right played in the impeachment of fellow conservative President Park Geun-hye:
Not until Park Geun-hye’s presidency (2013-2017) did the issue make a strong comeback. Conservatives in the National Assembly were then roughly divisible into a faction loyal to Park and one loyal to her predecessor Lee Myung Bak. Naturally his followers had learned to like the presidential system during his occupancy of the Blue House (2008-2013), only to find it inherently despotic again the moment Park took over. What really worried them was the likelihood that she would take revenge for the “nomination massacres” that had occurred during Lee’s rule, when he had excluded many of her followers from candidacies in parliamentary elections.
Sure enough, there ensued the “nomination massacre” of spring 2016, in which even some of the most popular pro-Lee or “non-Park” politicians were bypassed for nominations in favor of the president’s people. From then on calls for a parliamentary system grew in intensity until the Lee-conservative press broke the story of the Choi Soon-sil scandal in the autumn of 2016.
It was just what many pols had been waiting for: a chance to get the public so angry about the status quo that it would finally sign off on a whole new system of government. Conservatives were confident they could remove Park with left-wing help without losing the presidency altogether. They would simply make the returning hero Ban Ki-moon their candidate while pushing hard for constitutional revision, then trounce Moon in the election. What could go wrong? [B.R. Myers]
Well a lot did go wrong if the Lee Myung-Bak supporters thought they could get Ban Ki-moon elected. He ended up quickly dropping out of the election because of what he said was all the “Fake News” published about him. It probably was all fake news, but if he can’t fire back against lies in the media he clearly did not have what it took to be the President of South Korea. Without a strong candidate the Korean right ended up getting trounced in the election now leaving them in a worse position than if Park remained President.
JTBC reporter Shim Su-mi reports where and how she found the tablet PC.
The evidence has turned out to be thinner than was initially believed. The tablet PC on which Choi allegedly edited Park’s Dresden speech had so obviously been tampered with that the court did not consider it in Choi’s trial. It is still unclear how Park’s pressuring of businesses to contribute to this or that national team or foundation differed to a criminal degree from established presidential practices. We have to wait and see, but the recent decision to charge her even with meddling in her own party’s nominations suggests a desperation to find things that will stick. While she may well have deserved impeachment by absolute standards, she was probably less deserving of it than a few of her predecessors.
The planting of the tablet PC is the real scandal which no one in the Korean media seems eager to try and uncover. The finding of the tablet is in my opinion what turned the tide against President Park.
Anyway so what happened after President Moon took power? Well he staffed the Blue House with the same type of people that President Park had around her with hardly a complaint from the media and candlelight protest crowd:
The once bipartisan pretense that removing Park was a non-ideological response to her abuses of power is now upheld only by the right-wing impeachers and the foreign press. Upon his election Moon appointed several Gangnam leftists with records of tax avoidance, real-estate speculation, and the Choi-like pulling of strings on relatives’ behalf. This prompted much use of the crypto-Sinitic compound naero nambul, short for “When I cheat, it’s romance, when others do, it’s adultery.”
It seems like Korean far left is attempting to try and implement their long alleged plan to confederate with North Korea on the terms of the Kim regime:
The fiasco of the ruling Democratic Party correcting its outline of a rewrite of the 1987 Constitution a few hours after its release raises serious concerns about the liberal party’s real motive for pursuing constitutional reform. In its original outline, the party removed the word “free” from Article 4, which defines the national policy direction of pursuing peaceful unification based on basic free democracy principles. The party restored the word “free” four hours later after the outline’s release and claimed it was a typographical error. But skepticism lingered.
The issue of leaving out the word “free” from the democratic order has long been disputed among liberal scholars. As the party’s floor spokeswoman Je Youn-kyung explained, a reunified Korea may not be able to stick to its political system of free democracy once it becomes one with North Korea, which has lived under a socialist system for more than a half a century. The unified Koreas may have to choose a different or unique hybrid system of free or socialist democracy with respect to North Koreans. The constitutional reform drafted by an advisory commission of the National Assembly, which also stirred controversy over being left-leaning, also took out the word “free” in its proposal. [Joong Ang Ilbo]
You can read more at the link, but I think this was clearly a trial balloon by the Korean far left to see what the reaction would be. The Korean far left also want to change the make up of the national parliament to get more left wing politicians inside of it. Finally, they are pushing to make the South Korean presidency a four year term with the option for a four year reelection. The Korean far left likely knows that they likely need at least eight years of ROK governmental control to completely transform the government and thus why they are pushing for this.
I guess we will see in the coming months if the ROK public wants to embrace these leftist policies.
Here is the latest update on the status of ex-ROK President Park Geun-hye who continues to be jailed despite not being convicted of anything:
Yoo Yeong-ha
Former President Park Geun-hye, currently facing a criminal trial for conspiring with her friend to receive bribes from conglomerates, is extremely regretful that she was fooled by her longtime confidante, Park’s onetime defense lawyer said Wednesday.
Park was indicted in April 2017 for having abused her power to receive bribes from conglomerates by conspiring with her friend, Choi Soon-sil.
The former president is also charged with leaking confidential information to Choi. She has been boycotting the trial since October, describing the accusations as “political retaliation.”
All her lawyers, including a longtime associate, Yoo Yeong-ha, resigned from the case to protest a judge’s decision to extend her detention to April 2018.
In an interview with the JoongAng Ilbo, Yoo spoke for the first time about the case and his client. It was Yoo’s first media interview since Park was impeached and ousted from presidency in March of last year. The interview took place on Wednesday, and the JoongAng Ilbo published it in Friday’s edition.
Yoo said Park had not known about Choi’s alleged illicit activities when she was president. “The National Intelligence Service, police and the presidential senior secretary for civil affairs never briefed her about Choi,” Yoo said. “She said it is unfortunate that no one informed her about Choi’s activities.”
Park was indicted in April for alleged crimes committed during her failed presidency. Prosecutors said Park, in collusion with Choi, received massive bribes from conglomerates through two cultural and sports foundations Choi practically controlled. Samsung’s contributions to the foundations and generous sponsorship of equestrian training for Choi’s daughter, Chung Yoo-ra, were described as bribes, and Samsung Electronics Vice Chairman Lee Jae-yong was also indicted for offering or promising the president a total of 43.3 billion won ($40.7 million).
Yoo said Park is firm on three key issues surrounding her charges. “Park is firm that she never heard from Choi that Samsung Group offered support for Choi’s daughter’s equestrian training,” Yoo said. “Park is also firm that she never asked Samsung Vice Chairman Lee to support Choi and her daughter. She also stands firm that she never ordered An Chong-bum, then senior economic affairs secretary, to create foundations.”
Regarding the newly added charges that Park had misappropriated the funds of the National Intelligence Service (NIS) and used the money for private purposes, Yoo said the former leader is also innocent on this count. Earlier this month, the prosecution said Park had used 1.5 billion won of misappropriated NIS funds for private affairs, including beauty treatments.
Yoo had visited Park at the Seoul Detention Center after the new charges were added. Speculation was high that Yoo would be rehired, but Park ultimately did not retain him.
“At the beginning of her term, Park was briefed that the Blue House of the previous administrations had received money from the NIS and used it, and there is no legal problem involving the practice,” Yoo said. “She therefore told her officials to do business as usual. She never received any report about spending the NIS money.”
Yoo added, “It’s also not true that Park used the NIS money for private affairs. A president has their own special-activities account. There’s no reason for her to use the NIS money.”
Yoo also said it is unfair to hold Park accountable for the administration’s creation and operation of a blacklist of liberal artists to oppress them and cut their funding just because she was briefed about a plan.
“She doesn’t seem to recall any specific order,” Yoo said. “If you argue that she made a tacit order for something just because she received a briefing about it, it means that presidents will be linked to all sorts of crimes in the future. No administration will be safe, if you use that logic.” [Joong Ang Ilbo]
You can read more at the link, but on this issue I have yet to see the evidence that Park ever accepted a bribe or knew what Choi was up to. If this all ends up being smoke and mirrors to get her out of office this is going to cause a precedent that whenever the conservatives take power they will legally go after liberal presidents for real or imagined reasons as well.
Former President Lee Myung-bak speaks during a press conference at his office in Seoul on Jan. 17, 2018. Lee strongly protested prosecutors’ investigation of his former aides, denouncing it as “political retaliation” and urging prosecutors to take him on directly without harassing aides. (Yonhap)
