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President Yoon Suk-yeol gives a policy briefing and press conference at the presidential office’s briefing room in Seoul on Aug. 29, 2024. (pool photo)

The policy briefing and press conference that Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol held on Thursday showed us once again that Yoon’s view of reality is far removed from public sentiment.

Yoon failed to dispel suspicions about his alleged meddling in the Marine Corps’ investigation into a corporal who died in the line of duty and about the prosecutors’ decision not to press charges against Yoon’s wife, Kim Keon-hee, for accepting a name-brand handbag. Instead, he stayed mum on the major disputes swirling around him.

Yoon made clear he disagrees with calls for a special probe into meddling in the Marine Corps’ investigation, claiming that “the current investigation is going well” and that a National Assembly hearing already showed the meddling allegations are baseless.

The president also praised a police investigation that didn’t find any fault with the leadership of Lim Seong-geun, the former commander of the Marine Corps 1st Division. “I don’t think any objections could be raised about the results of the investigation,” he remarked.

But despite Yoon’s claims, various kinds of circumstantial evidence suggest there are in fact solid grounds for believing Yoon meddled in the Marine Corps’ investigation. Shortly after Marine Corps investigators transferred the case of the corporal’s death to the North Gyeongsang Province police agency on Aug. 2, 2023, Yoon spoke on the phone no fewer than seven times with the defense minister, the minister’s secretary and the deputy minister.

That was the same day that Col. Park Jeong-hun was dismissed from the investigation team and charged with insubordination and that the case files were returned to the Marine Corps. Since the suspicions about Yoon’s meddling in the investigation are becoming more concrete, his claim that the allegations are baseless sounds more like guidelines for the ongoing investigation.

After prosecutors decided not to charge first lady Kim Keon-hee under an anti-graft law for accepting a name-brand handbag, Yoon declined to address the scandal, which he said was “connected to his family.”

But the president did comment on accusations that Kim was given the “royal treatment” by prosecutors, who showed up at the office of the presidential security service and handed over their mobile phones before questioning Kim. “The method and location [of questioning] is often based on various considerations,” he said.

That was the incident that elicited a public apology from Prosecutor General Lee One-seok. “Before the law, there must be no special treatment or sacred cows, but that principle was not followed in our questioning of the president’s wife,” Korea’s top prosecutor said in the apology. In effect, the president has confirmed that his wife is a sacred cow as far as his administration is concerned.

After Lee Jae-myung, head of the main opposition Democratic Party, proposed holding a one-on-one meeting with Yoon to move past the political deadlock, Yoon essentially rejected the idea, stating that the priority should be on bipartisan communication and normalization of the National Assembly. The president is ignoring the fact that the main cause of trouble at the National Assembly is his own indiscriminate use of veto power, thumbing his nose at the legislative branch’s lawmaking authority.

Yoon ended up using the policy briefing and press conference, which went on for over two hours on Thursday, to say what he wanted to say, rather than what the people wanted to hear. Even after his party’s shellacking in the last general elections, largely as a result of public condemnation of himself, Yoon hasn’t altered his unilateral approach to governance at all.

Yoon still hasn’t learned that a high-and-mighty president who refuses to respond to public complaints will only incur even greater wrath.

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