hankyoreh

South Korea‘s presidential office

In its response to an internal audit investigating allegations that Chung Yoon-hoi, former Chief of Staff to President Park Geun-hye when she was a second-term lawmaker, attempted to influence state affairs, the Blue House missed the point entirely.

Rather than actually getting to the bottom of suspicions that Chung and backroom powerbrokers were meddling in government affairs, the Blue House is bizarrely trying to shift the focus of the incident toward investigating how the document was leaked.

Illustrating this is how the Blue House took quick action to denigrate the report in question as “complete rubbish, a hodgepodge of groundless rumors like a stock market newsletter,” even as it filed charges against the Segye Ilbo, the newspaper that covered the report in question, for libel. (In South Korea’s stock market, certain small newsletters (jjirashi) gather and publish collections of rumor and chatter.)

First of all, it is hard to take seriously the Blue House’s claim that the report in question is “rubbish.” The Office of the Presidential Secretary for Civil Service Discipline at the Blue House, which is responsible for managing government personnel and for carrying out internal probes of public officials, is one of the key offices in the Blue House.

Nevertheless, the Blue House is openly - and shamelessly - claiming that no less than the Office of the Presidential Secretary for Civil Service Discipline is churning out rubbish. The Blue House has never taken a single measure whatsoever to censure the office for its rubbish production.

The remark about “rubbish,” in and of itself, is just as likely to make the Blue House a global laughing stock as the allegations that state affairs are being manipulated by figures behind the scenes.

A bigger problem, however, is the fact that the Blue House does not even have definite grounds for declaring the report to be “rubbish.” Without bothering to actually verify the claims made in the report, the Blue House said that it had closed the case after Presidential Chief of Staff Kim Ki-choon heard from the people implicated in the report that the charges were false.

While it is doubtful whether Kim even asked these people about the report, are there any circumstances under which the people implicated would willingly have admitted their attempts to manipulate state affairs?

If anything, the fact that the government response to such an important document petered out so quickly is itself evidence of the immense power wielded by the gatekeepers to power and the heavyweights behind the scenes.

The Blue House’s abrupt decision to file charges against the newspaper that ran a story on the document is truly shocking. The situation might be different if the document had not in fact been produced by the Blue House. This must be the first time that a government organization has filed charges against a newspaper for reporting on a document prepared by that very government organization.

We are compelled to denounce the Blue House’s distorted understanding of the press that is reflected in its attempt to use an investigation by the prosecutors to intimidate not only the paper in question but also other papers and quash further reporting on the topic.

Based on how things are going so far, it is very likely that the “truth that will be revealed by the prosecutors’ investigation” may be quite different from the truth about the alleged manipulation of government affairs.

Are the prosecutors going to bring all of their resources to bear in vigorously investigating whether Chung Yoon-hoi and the backroom powerbrokers were actually manipulating state affairs? That is highly unlikely.

It’s much more likely that the prosecutors will do little more than listen to these figures’ side of the story. It seems obvious that, after questioning the administrator who prepared the report, prosecutors will conclude that the report did no more than compile rumors floating around without providing any hard evidence.

But will that defuse the Chung Yoon-hoi scandal and silence talk about powerbrokers in the shadows and gatekeepers to power? Once again, that is highly unlikely. It’s time for the Blue House to disabuse itself of the fantasy that its cheap tricks will extricate it from this situation.

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]