Opposition lawmakers hold emergency press conference during committee session; accuse ruling party of unilateral move
People Power Party lawmakers on the National Assembly's Legislation and Judiciary Committee pushed back Wednesday after the ruling Democratic Party moved to table the so-called "fabricated indictment" special prosecutor bill at a plenary committee session, vowing to "use every means available to block it" if the Democratic Party forces the bill through.
Park Hyung-su, who leads the PPP's side on the committee, held an emergency press conference at the National Assembly on Wednesday morning, saying the Democratic Party had "unilaterally tabled the bill to withdraw indictments without any consultation with the opposition" and accused the party of "revealing its true colors in order to save President Lee Jae Myung."
Park said the bill's very name was a fraud. "It claims to investigate fabricated indictments, but in reality it is a self-rescue special prosecutor bill designed to make the criminal cases against President Lee and his associates disappear," Park said. He also questioned whether the move had come at the direction of President Lee, who had visited the National Assembly two days earlier to deliver a policy address.
On the Democratic Party's decision to remove a controversial provision allowing the special prosecutor to withdraw indictments, Park called it "wordplay," saying the underlying structure remained intact. "All they did was bar the special prosecutor from directly withdrawing indictments — the mechanism for manufacturing a pretext to do so is still there," Park said. "Once the special prosecutor gets going, the prosecutors who investigated and indicted President Lee will be summoned one after another as suspects."
Park said removing the withdrawal provision amounted to nothing more than shifting "from brazen shielding to a more cunning form of shielding," and said the bill represented National Assembly interference in ongoing trials and a violation of judicial independence.
Fellow PPP lawmaker Yoon Sang-hyun called on the Democratic Party to "immediately withdraw the tabling of the fabricated indictment special prosecutor bill."
Yoon said it was "a direct violation of the conflict-of-interest prohibition" for President Lee to appoint a special prosecutor to handle his own cases, and accused the Democratic Party and the Lee administration of "destroying the rule of law over the past year and five months."
PPP lawmaker Ju Jin-woo also escalated his criticism, saying the Democratic Party had "merely dropped the words 'withdrawal of indictment' because of fierce public backlash, while sneaking in a loophole provision that would still allow Lee's indictment to be withdrawn if needed." He pointed to a clause in the bill stipulating that the special prosecutor would have jurisdiction over cases currently under trial — a provision, he said, that had never appeared in any previous special prosecutor act.
PPP lawmaker Kwak Gyu-taek mocked the bill as "a special prosecutor act of defendant Lee Jae Myung, by defendant Lee Jae Myung, for defendant Lee Jae Myung."
Kwak added that the Democratic Party had rushed to launch a parliamentary investigation into Supreme Court Chief Justice Jo Hee-de, then quietly dropped it when public opinion turned against them, and was now pushing a special prosecutor bill to rescue President Lee. He said the party appeared to be in a hurry to create grounds for a retrial after Lee Hwa-young's alleged accomplice announced plans to seek one.
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