Gyeonggi Province Governor Chu Mi-ae responded within hours to President Lee Jae-myung's warning against hardliners in his own camp, saying she would "leave the truth behind rather than keep a shameful silence." Lee had said that "reckless extremism and radical claims no one can answer for must be guarded against, whether from the left or the right." The two clashed once again on social media, this time over the nomination of Kim Ji-yong as head of the Serious Crimes Investigation Agency.
Chu made the remarks on Facebook early on the 5th, writing that she carries "regret for having failed in the end to protect the few righteous prosecutors such as Park Eun-jung and Lee Jong-keun, who committed themselves to prosecution reform with the same devotion as the independence movement, only to go unprotected and be pushed out of the organization or shuffled into dead-end posts."
Chu said she was writing because "there is a clear question of falsehood in the briefing issued by the presidential office's senior secretary for public relations, and I cannot stay silent about what I know." Sung Ki-hong, senior secretary for public relations, had said on the 1st that claims that Kim refused a forensic examination in connection with the 2020 Channel A case were not true, rebutting those opposed to the appointment.
Chu laid out her counterargument point by point, citing her time as justice minister. "On July 2, 2020, as justice minister, I ordered the prosecutor general excluded from the Channel A case and had the Seoul Central District Prosecutors' Office conduct the investigation independently," she said. "Kim, who took office as head of the criminal division at the Supreme Prosecutors' Office on June 11, 2021, therefore could not have been involved in that case at all, and was not involved. The claim that the nominee refused a forensic examination is clearly false."
Chu also revisited the question of responsibility by raising the complaint-solicitation case that surfaced the following year. "The complaint-solicitation case was two sides of the same coin as the Channel A case, so conducting a forensic examination of Han Dong-hoon's phone was entirely warranted," she said. "Yet Prosecutor General Kim Oh-soo bears heavy blame for not carrying out the forensic examination, using the justice minister's exclusion of the prosecutor general from the case as a pretext, and Kim Ji-yong, who as criminal division head stood in the chain of command over these cases, can hardly escape responsibility either."
Chu cast the nominee as part of the prosecution establishment, saying that "this dogged collusion by prosecution forces worked in every corner, and that is how Yoon Suk-yeol and Han Dong-hoon were able to slip through the law." She added: "I was a fool never to have imagined that a day would come when bullets would fly from behind just as I expected prosecution reform to clear the final stretch, forcing me to go back over all of this in detail."
Lee had written on X, formerly Twitter, on the night of the 4th that "irresponsible extremism must be guarded against anywhere, whether from the left or the right, at the front or the rear." He added that "radical claims no one can answer for and groundless agitation often stem not from concern for the people and the country but from self-interest — a desire to draw attention to oneself and claim sole credit for the achievements of reform."
Lee did not name anyone, but the message was read as directed at the continuing pushback from hardliners across the ruling bloc over Kim's nomination.
