Political retaliation for retaliation’s sake

If Lee Jae-myung’s former lawyers — who became DP members of the committee — summon the four prosecutors investigating their own boss for questioning, that’s retaliation.

The motion submitted by the Democratic Party (DP) to impeach four prosecutors dumbfounds us. The majority party pressures them to quit their jobs for totally unreasonable grounds. The motion is aimed at retaliating against the prosecutors for their investigations of DP leader Lee Jae-myung or disgracing them no matter what. We wonder if the DP bent on submitting nonsensical motions is really a public party.

The DP wants to impeach prosecutor Park Sang-yong for allegedly pasting his feces on the wall of a restroom in the Ulsan District Prosecutors’ Office in January 2019 when he was completely drunk. The prosecutor investigated a private company’s suspicious remittance of $8 million to North Korea on Lee’s behalf when he was Gyeonggi governor. In the motion, the DP accused the prosecutor of “inflicting damage on public properties.”

But the prosecutor refuted the accusation, saying he drank only a small amount of soju with the district office chief and other prosecutors at that time. Other employees also testified that he went home at 9:30 p.m. in sobriety. A prosecutor who was with Park at the dinner sent a text message to Rep. Lee Seong-yoon, a former prosecutor who first raised the suspicion over the prosecutor in a Legislation and Judiciary Committee meeting last month. The message said it was not the prosecutor who made the trouble in the district office.

Nevertheless, the DP is pushing for his impeachment. Its habitual impeachments of prosecutors without affirming facts cannot be pardoned. Even if the prosecutor did it, this can hardly be a reason for impeachment. The party’s claim that the prosecution compelled former Gyeonggi Gov. Lee Hwa-young to make a false statement and cajoled him over drinks into accepting his crime is no different. The DP has no evidence to back up its claim.

The DP’s grounds for impeaching prosecutor Uhm Hee-joon also don’t make sense. He investigated the Daejang-dong development scandal involving the DP leader. The party claimed that the prosecutor coerced inmates detained in the same room as former Prime Minister Han Myeong-sook into making a false statement over her acceptance of an illegal political fund. But the DP’s allegation was already proven wrong under the Moon Jae-in administration. The DP’s reasons for impeaching the two other prosecutors were also proved wrong.

The majority party wants to launch an investigation by the Legislation and Judiciary Committee first. But if Lee Jae-myung’s former lawyers — who became DP members of the committee — summon the four prosecutors investigating their own boss for questioning, that’s retaliation. The DP must stop its abuse of majority power.