Cho Kuk calls for election law amendment to clear Lee Jae Myung through dismissal ruling, not dropped charges

Cho Kuk, head of the Rebuilding Korea Party's policy research institute, said Sunday he was "saddened" by a barrage of attacks from the ruling camp after he remarked that a guilty verdict was likely in President Lee Jae Myung's retrial on remand. He also said the election law violation case against Lee should be resolved through a "dismissal ruling" achieved via legislation — not through a withdrawal of charges.

Cho made the remarks in a Facebook post, calling on the National Assembly to pass a pending amendment to the Public Official Election Act that would revise the crime of publishing false facts — a bill already approved by the Legislation and Judiciary Committee and referred to a plenary vote.

Cho first addressed the criticism directed at him following a Facebook post he had written Tuesday. "Some Democratic Party lawmakers and self-styled pro-Lee commentators and YouTubers cast me as someone who wants President Lee convicted, then swarmed me like a pack of bees," he wrote. "I was dumbfounded, but I had to defend myself. They seem to think that kind of attack helps President Lee — I can only feel sorry about it. The way they act is like a 'machine that manufactures anti-Lee sentiment.'"

Turning to the proposed amendment, Cho said that if the bill passed, it would affect both the ongoing case against former President Yoon Suk Yeol and the case against Lee that would resume after his presidential term ends. "In the order of Yoon first, then Lee, the path to a dismissal ruling opens in both cases," he said.

Cho said the ruling against Yoon followed the legal reasoning in the Supreme Court's decision — under Chief Justice Jo Hee-de — to overturn and remand the guilty verdict against then-candidate Lee, and that the court hearing Lee's second-instance trial after his term ends would be bound by that same reasoning.

He also argued that the word "conduct" — added to the Public Official Election Act in a 2000 amendment — was "an extremely broad and vague concept compared with other defined categories of false facts, such as place of birth, family relations, status and occupation," and had long drawn criticism for enabling arbitrary enforcement by allowing punishment to cover virtually any statement or behavior.

"Amending the law to roll back the false-fact provision to its pre-2000 form is not a matter of progressive versus conservative, or left versus right," Cho said. "I respectfully ask both the Democratic Party and the People Power Party: let us hold a plenary vote on the Public Official Election Act amendment that has been sitting in a cabinet for about a year and a half."

Cho closed by recalling that Democratic Party lawmakers and pro-Lee commentators had criticized him when he raised concerns during the legislative processes for a dedicated insurrection court law, a new offense of judicial distortion, and a new serious crimes investigation agency. "I ask them to look at what the final outcomes of those efforts turned out to be," he said.