hankyoreh

By Park Hyun, Washington correspondent

Korean-Americans are taking part in a campaign to help Stephen Kim, who has been waging a battle in the courts since US prosecutors charged him with violating the Espionage Act by leaking material related to national security in 2010.

“We’ve decided to hold our first fundraiser in Flushing, New York, on November 21,” said Lee Myung-seok, former president of the Korean-American Association of Queens, New York on Oct. 22. “We’ll establish a committee for helping Stephen Kim, and we’ll launch rescue committees in each major city.”

“We’re also planning to send petitions to the White House, the Justice Department, and major media outlets,” Lee said.

On Oct. 22, Lee met with Kim (46, Korean name Kim Jin-woo), his lawyer Abbe Lowell, and his sister Yuri Lustenberger-Kim in New York to discuss the campaign to exonerate Kim.

Lowell explained that the US Justice Department had increased the number of prosecutors assigned to Kim’s case to five. The Justice Department has assigned an unprecedented number of prosecutors to the case because it wants to make an example of Kim, Lowell said.

Explaining that fighting the Justice Department requires reviewing a vast number of documents, Lowell said that Kim’s legal team needed to be expanded but that this was impossible at the moment.

In 2009, Kim was working at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He had been dispatched to the State Department as a senior advisor of intelligence in the areas of verification and compliance.

Around that time, he made contact with Fox News reporter James Rosen after being introduced by a public relations official from the State Department.

Later, Kim was charged with leaking sensitive information in connection with a report written by Rosen about the possibility of North Korea carrying out an additional nuclear weapons test.

Since then, Park has been fighting a desperate legal battle. In order to cover the US$800,000 in legal fees incurred so far, he has been forced to sell his parents’ house and draw upon his sister’s personal savings.

“So far, there have been about 10 preliminary hearings, and the actual trial is scheduled to begin on April 28,” Lee said. “It looks like it will cost at least a million dollars by the time the trial is over.”

“We created the English-language website www.stephenkim.org to raise support for Kim and we’re also planning to design another website in Korean,” said Lee.

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