Lee made the comment on Sept. 23 as he arrived for his first day at the Supreme Prosecutors' Office in Seocho-gu, Seoul, where he met reporters. Observers read the remark as leaving the door open rather than ruling out a withdrawal.
The People Power Party pushed back, saying Lee had "pledged loyalty to President Lee Jae-myung on his very first day at work." Rep. Joo Jin-woo of the PPP said, "It means he intends to manipulate the fact-finding results and withdraw the indictment" — a reference to the probe involving President Lee. He added, "He should know that if he joins this doomed scheme without reading the room, Lee Jung-hyun himself will end up in prison as well."
Park Choong-kwon, the PPP's chief spokesperson, took issue with Lee's past alignment with the Democratic Party's claims. "During the North Korea remittance investigation, this is a man who never once properly reviewed the investigation records, yet went before a National Assembly hearing, went along with the Democratic Party's one-sided framing of the so-called "salmon drinking party" allegation — a claim that the investigation team had wined and dined a key witness in the case, and sold out his junior investigators by calling it a 'flawed investigative method,'" Park said.
Concerns also surfaced inside the prosecution. Kong Bong-sook, a prosecutor at the Seoul High Prosecutors' Office, wrote on social media the previous day, "If it's this person, he could withdraw the indictment voluntarily, even without the minister's instruction," adding, "He seems to have expressed several times, through prosecutor disciplinary actions and the parliamentary investigation committee, that he has both the will and the ability to do so."
There are also concerns that the Prosecution Future Committee's fact-finding team — created to review cases in which human rights violations or abuses of authority were alleged during prosecution investigations and indictments — could be reduced to a pretext for withdrawing the indictment. The team's mandate, initially set at 90 days and due to expire on Sept. 22, was recently extended by 30 days.
