The South Korean conservative media cartel is reaching new lows in its attacks on the former justice minister Cho Guk. Cho Guk was an advocate for reform of judicial administration in South Korea aimed primarily at reducing the almost unlimited powers of the prosecution offices. These offices have been used to politicize justice, trump up charges against politicians on the left, and prosecute them with perjured testimony, coerced witnesses, and otherwise falsified evidence. They also nolle prosse and stall cases against powerful business (chaebol) interests on the right, and suppress investigations of government corruption when it involves themselves. The overwhelmingly right wing media in South Korea cooperates in schemes with the conservative prosecution cabal, led by former Prosecutor General Yoon Seok-yeol, using information unlawfully leaked by prosecution sources to frame democratic politicians and progressive activists as guilty before a trial has even started.
In a Chosun Ilbo report, Cho Guk’s daughter and Cho Guk are portrayed in a graphic, as members of a prostitution ring, that steals the wallets of johns who procure their services. The images of Cho Guk in the doorway, wearing his emblematic black back pack, and his daughter, Cho Min, wearing her black ball cap (to disguise her appearance from harassing reporters who have been stalking her relentlessly), are borrowed to associate them with this newspaper report on a completely unrelated criminal enterprise. It’s a straight up blatant instance of defamation of which there have been scores against Cho Guk and his family.
(Source-MBC News 6.24 News Today youtube - graphic original source Chosun Ilbo online 6.21 성매매 기사 '조국 부녀' 삽화…조국 "면피성 사과" ) "First take a shower" Entice with prostitution then steal their wallet.
Circumstantially, this is related to two other developments, the first, is that Yoon Seok-yeol, the former prosecutor general who arranged for prosecution of Cho Guk’s family, perhaps for the first time in his career, is being subjected to unfavorable press coverage from some mainstream sources. Yoon is leading in the polls currently as the favorite conservative candidate for presidential office in the election next March. Currently, his mother in law is being tried for medical insurance fraud where she obtained government payments for rehabilitation services in a non-profit medical business she was not qualified to participate in. The other participants in the scheme are already in prison. Yoon claimed that no one ever lost a dime due to his mother in law’s investment schemes. However, the truth is alleged to be quite different. A verdict and perhaps sentence from her first trial is anticipated in early July. His mother in law has been involved in multiple fraudulent schemes and somehow was never held to account by the criminal justice system. The latest revelation in a series of scandals involves Yoon's mother in law and wife in a stock price manipulation scheme in which she and a director from Deutsche Motors, colluded to enter numerous bid and ask market quotes to double the price of the stock in which Yoon’s wife held substantial interest.
(Source- Hol Seu-hyung, 시사건건, youtube 6.23) Independent commentator Hol describes Deutsche Motors stock manipulation scheme.
There is digital and audio evidence of this scheme, which at least a few conservative pundits believe is “difficult to defend.” There is also a set of two documents called the X files allegedly outlining a series of unlawful acts by Yoon, Yoon’s mother in law, and Yoon’s wife. The actual list of crimes hasn’t been published, but one political pundit described a few of them. One of them is that Yoon interfered in an investigation of a Yongsan tax official who also happens to have the Yoon family name. Another allegation concerns his wife’s business commissions from art exhibitions arranged through her company Kobana Contents. Her exhibition commissions are typically in the tens of thousands dollars, the funds being received from corporate sponsors (chaebol families). Some allege that these fees are in fact a way of paying off her husband for official favor. Another question raised in addition to the Deutsche Motors stock manipulation scheme involves the issue of how Yoon's capital account reporting as a public official increased to above five million dollars when at the time of his marriage in 2012, he was not wealthy. He says this is my wife’s property. He was in public office the entire time. The underlying allegation is that his wife married him to use his official position as a prosecutor to protect herself and her mother in law from lawsuits and prosecutions involving their prior frauds including the Deutsche Motors scheme.
Yoon denies all the allegations against him and his family. He says the claims are unsupported and that this is a political attack by the left. The so called People Power Party on the right, the main opposition party to the democratic administration, hasn’t embraced Yoon yet as a party member and candidate for president. Perhaps they are waiting for the trial of his mother in law to play out, and a determination whether a prosecution of the Deutsche Motors scandal can even take place considering the underlying facts are more than ten years old, raising a statute of limitations issue. Even the alleged coverup which appears to have started in 2013, may have taken place too long ago. It remains to seen if this could play a role as a campaign issue.
The second aspect is that Cho Guk’s new memoir concerning the railroad political prosecutions of his wife, Professor Chung Kyung-sim and himself, which are still underway, is selling 100,000 copies a week. The book and the independent media coverage of the book underline the corruption in prosecution offices and the media even as the trial hearings of his wife go forward. The chief witness against Cho Guk’s wife admitted on a recently disclosed audio tape (after she was convicted of “forging” an academic certificate for her daughter and sentenced to four years in prison) that he did it to remove any possibility that, Cho Guk, a “pro-China and pro-North Korea” politician, could become president of South Korea. He claims he thereby saved South Korea from the ravages of poverty, civil war, and destruction. The witness, Choi Song-hae, is the former president of Dongyang University. It is alleged in some independent journalism reports that Choi’s academic credentials are falsified, and that he was suspected of financial self dealing at the time he was asked by prosecutors and apparently also by conservative party members to testify against Cho Guk’s wife, a professor at the University.
Lee Jun-seok, the new leader of the People Power Party (the South Korean conservative opposition) says if the X-files contents are cause for ethical censure, then the contents should be revealed as they must be evaluated. It appears the party would like to get the issues resolved early on, so questions about Yoon's ethics don't blow up the party's campaign for president in later stages.
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