[Asia Economy Reporter Kim Hyung-min] The fact that whistleblower Jo Seong-eun deleted the original Telegram chat room with Kim Woong, a member of the People Power Party, is expected to pose difficulties for the prosecution and the Corruption Investigation Office for High-ranking Officials (CIO) in clarifying the allegations. Some express concerns that the investigation could become a half-hearted one, having lost the "smoking gun" (decisive evidence).
According to the legal community on the 16th, the CIO confirmed that Jo deleted the Telegram chat room where she received the complaint from Kim on April 3 and 8 of last year, after the allegations were first reported. Jo also announced on her social networking service (SNS) that she deleted the chat room.
This is the chat room where the message "Sent by Son Joon-sung" appeared when the complaint was delivered. The CIO is now in a situation where it must proceed with the investigation holding only screenshots without the original chat room. There is no way to recover the original deleted by the user.
For investigative agencies that only have screenshots without the original, it is inevitably a difficult situation considering future trials. Recently, courts have been strictly reviewing cases where Telegram, KakaoTalk, and other mobile messenger conversations are key evidence, requiring originals and verification that messages were clearly transmitted between parties without suspicion of manipulation. This has become even more important as users increasingly have the ability to edit conversation content directly on mobile messengers.
Considering this, Jo’s deletion of the Telegram chat room with Kim could be a "fatal blow" to the investigative agencies. The remaining options are to find other clear evidence or to discover related chat rooms on the mobile phones of Kim or former policy officer Son. The prosecution and CIO may focus on analyzing former policy officer Son’s iPhone. However, iPhones are classified as the most difficult devices to decrypt and extract stored content among mobile phones.
Jo appeared on YTN Radio on the same day following her SNS post and reiterated that deleting the Telegram chat room with Kim was not a big issue, saying, "I had already stored the original digital contents a long time ago, including not only the conversation contents but also the account belonging to Prosecutor Son himself."
Regarding the question, "Wouldn't submitting separately stored materials to the prosecution reduce their effectiveness as evidence later?" she responded, "That distorts the matter," adding, "We have submitted sufficient evidence and materials to judge everything, and issues such as whether Prosecutor Son Joon-sung is really Prosecutor Son Joon-sung in the Telegram room or requests to verify the Telegram method are completely unrelated to the matter."
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