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staff photographer)

By Kim Su-heon, staff reporter

Trouble is brewing after new evidence surfaced on June 26 indicating that the Saenuri Party (NFP) had obtained the original transcript of the 2007 inter-Korean summit during the campaign period for the 2012 presidential election and made use of it during the election. If these allegations prove true, it would mean that the Park Geun-hye campaign had enlisted the aid of the National Intelligence Service (NIS) to illegally obtain and utilize the transcript of the inter-Korean summit with the goal of gaining an advantage in the election. This could lead to severe repercussions. Depending on developments, this may lead to allegations that the NIS (which is already being investigated by the prosecutors for trying to manufacture public opinion in the presidential election) was involved in yet more election rigging, and that the Lee Myung-bak administration and the Saenuri also interfered in the elections. It is not outside the realm of possibility that this could send shockwaves throughout the political arena.

One reason the allegations that the Saenuri obtained and utilized the transcript from the inter-Korean summit during the 2012 presidential election are being treated as fairly credible is that they were triggered by comments made by Saenuri lawmaker Kim Moo-sung. Kim was the campaign manager and head of the election committee for Park Geun-hye when she was running for president.

“I had already got a hold of the summit transcript of the talks during the presidential election and read it then,” sources quoted Kim as saying during a closed meeting of Saenuri officials. “After reading a few pages, my hands started trembling and I couldn’t finish it.”

“We read the transcript and the NFP held a meeting about it as well, but we thought it wouldn’t look good if we released it ourselves,” Kim was also reported as saying. “We asked [NIS chief] Won Sei-hoon to release the dialogue transcript, but he wasn’t cooperative, so ultimately we were unable to release the transcript.”

The recording of a conversation with Kwon Young-se, now ambassador to China ,that was leaked by Democratic Party (DP) lawmaker Park Beom-gye also increases the likelihood that Park’s election team acquired and shared the transcript from the summit. Kwon was another senior member of Park Geun-hye’s election campaign committee,

“In the recording, Kim is providing three of his acquaintances with detailed information about three paragraphs from the inter-Korean summit transcript, and what he says is virtually identical with the full text that the NIS disclosed,” Park Beom-gye said.

“Since the passage is quite long, it is impossible to believe that Kim was repeating from memory something that he had heard from someone else.” Park said that Kim was not simply passing along information someone had told him. Instead, the text he was quoting was so long that he would have had to have actually seen the inter-Korean summit transcript himself in order to communicate that information to someone else.

It is also worth taking note of the recent comments made by Ahn Jong-beom, a key figure in the Park Geun-hye election campaign. When Ahn was fielding questions from reporters on Jun. 23, one mentioned that they had heard that the Saenuri had made plans about using the NLL issue even before the remarks made by Legislation and Judiciary Committee Chair Democratic Party lawmaker Park Yeong-seon on June 17. “People started talking about making use of the NLL controversy a long time before that,” Ahn said. “But that was when the new administration was just getting started, and the plan was shelved because some people felt the timing wasn’t right.” Ahn’s answer confirms the fact that certain Saenuri members of the had obtained the transcript of the inter-Korean talks a long time ago and had wanted to put it to use under certain circumstances.

The prevailing view among politicians is that, if the Saenuri Party had obtained the inter-Korean summit transcript before the presidential election took place, the decision-making structure in the Park campaign is such that Park would also have known about the content of the transcript and would have been heavily involved in discussions how that content could be used. This means it is a highly volatile issue that could even lead to questions about the validity of the Park Geun-hye presidency. The Democratic Party immediately went on the offensive, claiming that the cover had been blown off the schemes by the Saenuri Party and the NIS to hijack the election.

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