Former Chief Prosecutor and ex-People Power Party lawmaker Kim Woong posted a message on the 2nd urging the Democratic Party to impeach opposition lawmakers with prosecutorial backgrounds who filed impeachment motions against four prosecutors who investigated Lee Jae-myung’s illegal North Korea remittance case and the Han Myeong-sook Prime Minister case.
On the afternoon of the same day, Kim posted on his Facebook under the title “A tip for the Democratic Party, who likes impeaching prosecutors,” writing, “This is a tip about former prosecutors who must be impeached and driven out.”
He first wrote, “One who blocked the indictment of Choi Kang-wook and was evaluated by the Bar Association president as a ‘person with strong political bias,’ and who is suspected of blocking the investigation into the Blue House’s interference in the Ulsan mayoral election.”
Kim also wrote, “One who has a spouse enjoying tens of billions of won in preferential treatment for former officials, one who did not come to the office even once from mid-July 2022 to early March 2024 but received a monthly salary exceeding 100 million won, one who blocked investigations to cover up crimes of the powerful and caused subordinate prosecutors to resign, one so incompetent that the excuse ‘could not grasp the records’ might be true, to the point of ridicule, and one who illegally leaked and manipulated inspection data.”
The posts about the spouse receiving preferential treatment and the resignation of subordinate prosecutors appear to refer to Park Eun-jung, a lawmaker from the Innovation Party for Korea, who was dismissed and disciplined for illegally leaking inspection data on President Yoon during former Minister Choo Mi-ae’s tenure, and who caused then-Deputy Chief Prosecutor Park Ha-young to resign amid conflicts over the investigation into the illegal sponsorship funds case involving Lee Jae-myung during his time as head of the Seongnam branch.
Her husband, lawyer Lee Jong-geun, a former chief prosecutor, took charge of a multi-level marketing fraud case worth about 1.19 trillion won immediately after retirement and received 2.2 billion won in fees, sparking controversy over high fees and preferential treatment for former officials. Regarding this, Park was also reported by a civic group for false statements under the Public Official Election Act during her proportional representation candidacy, saying, “If there had been preferential treatment, I should have earned 16 billion won.”
Kim also wrote, “One who tried to distort legal interpretations for months to bury the coup leaders in the National Cemetery, pressuring subordinate prosecutors to resign, one suspected of receiving huge fees in exchange for covering up gambling den investigations, and one who abused investigative authority and engaged in media manipulation to stab the prosecutor general disliked by the regime in the back,” adding, “It will be easy to find them, as they are right next to you.”
This is presumed to relate to Lee Geon-tae, a Democratic Party lawmaker who was a former lawyer for Jeong Jin-sang, a close aide to Lee Jae-myung and former political coordination officer in the Democratic Party leader’s office in 2008 when he served as a legal affairs officer at the Ministry of Justice, and Yang Bu-nam, a Democratic Party lawmaker who, during his time as head of the Gangwon Land recruitment corruption investigation team in 2018, leaked a press release claiming that then-Prosecutor General Moon Moo-il had unjustly exercised investigative authority. Kwon Seong-dong of the People Power Party, who opposed Yang and brought the case to trial, was acquitted in all three trials from the first to the third instance.
Kim is the author of the essay “Prosecutor’s Office,” which was the original work for the JTBC drama of the same name aired in 2019?2020.
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