Why it matters: President Lee’s prosecution reform has outrun its sponsor. The hardliners he empowered now attack his own nominee as a “prosecution loyalist,” while his government moves to discipline the reformist prosecutor it promoted. A reform that treats a whole profession as the enemy will struggle to staff the agencies it has created.
The Red Guards of Prosecution Reform
The dissolution of the Prosecutors’ Office, and with it the established criminal justice system, apparently couldn’t satisfy the zealots of prosecution reform. The revolution, it seems, must go on.
For lack of deliberation and preparation, the new institutions — the Public Indictment Office공소청 and the Serious Crime Investigation Agency중수청 (SCIA) — opened without chiefs. The launch was so hasty that some staff reportedly wandered the building looking for their own offices.
The hardliners are now attacking Kim Ji-yong, President Lee Jae-myung’s nominee to lead the SCIA, for being a “prosecution loyalist.” In less cabalistic terms, his sin is being a former prosecutor who held a senior post in the Prosecutors’ Office. Mr Lee, however, thinks they have other motives. “The reform is for the public, not for building political legacies for specific individuals,” he wrote on X.
This isn’t the first time the hardliners have questioned Mr Lee’s commitment to the reform. What’s different now is that their criticism has become blunter and is aimed squarely at Mr Lee, as they sense that public support for him is waning. As ever, Gyeonggi Governor Choo Mi-ae, the “Kingslayer,” led the attack.
Anyone who reads Lim Eun-jung’s story will think of China’s Red Guards. Their history also hints at how this ends.
A renegade prosecutor, Ms Lim made her name as an ardent reformist and was appointed to head the SCIA’s Gwangju regional office. Then she went too far, attacking her prospective superior in public. Interior Minister Yun Ho-jung, whose ministry oversees the agency, said on Sunday that he would order an inspection of her for conduct unbecoming a senior official.
From the beginning, what made Ms Lim, who is not known to be competent as a prosecutor, famous among Minjoo supporters was her tendency to politicize (in public) everything about the prosecutors. In attacking Mr Lee’s nominee for SCIA chief, she was doing what she has always done. It was the Lee administration that promoted her to a senior post, and it is the same administration that now threatens to discipline her — both times for the same behavior.
The Lee administration unleashed “revolutionary” zeal to rally support, and now it has spun out of control. The zealots are turning on the leader’s own men: first a justice minister, now the president’s nominee and, implicitly, the chairman president. The order to inspect Ms Lim echoes Chairman Mao scolding the Red Guard leaders.
I honestly see no difference between “prosecution loyalist” and “capitalist roader.” History will judge the prosecution reform as it has judged the Cultural Revolution: Minjoo’s reform will do to Korea’s criminal justice what the Cultural Revolution did to China’s social fabric.
The President Never Sleeps
An online forum user claims to have analyzed Mr Lee’s activity on X and shared a log of what he did over the weekend. I got ChatGPT to translate it:
| Time | Followers | Following | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| October 10 | |||
| 22:10 | -49 | -9 | Blocked accounts (including 9 mutual followers). |
| 22:27 | — | — | New post: “Create a better world so that more people…” |
| 23:37 | — | — | New post: “Sites hosting illegal sexual exploitation material, illegal gambling, etc.…” |
| October 11 | |||
| 00:14 | -5 | -3 | Blocked accounts. |
| 00:45 | 0 | -1 | Unfollowed. |
| 02:06 | -21 | 0 | Blocked only followers who were not mutual followers. |
| 04:00 | -14 | -7 | Blocked accounts. |
| 05:59 | -20 | -5 | Blocked accounts. |
| 07:53 | -15 | -6 | Blocked accounts. |
| 09:45 | -2 | -4 | Primarily unfollowing. |
| 10:12 | — | — | New post: “I am reminded of the late Mayor Park Won-soon…” |
| 10:36 | — | — | New post: “Living comfortably off their parents without experiencing hardship…” |
| 10:41 | — | — | New post: “Thanks to Assemblyman Park Gyun-taek…” |
| 10:58 | +2 | +2 | New follows. |
| 11:08 | — | — | New post: “In cases where a loan agreement has been signed and a property has already been purchased…” |
| 11:18 | +8 | -1 | Unfollowed. |
| 11:21 | — | — | New post: “South Korea Has Entered the Era of Arctic Shipping Routes.” (Deleted at 11:47) |
| 11:27 | -1 | -3 | Blocked or unfollowed accounts. |
| 11:29 | — | — | New post: “South Korea Welcomes the Era of Arctic Shipping Routes.” (Reposted with revisions) |
| 11:37 | +2 | -1 | Unfollowed. |
This newsletter has worried about Mr Lee’s social media habit more than once. But this goes beyond anything I imagined, unless Mr Lee uses an AI agent to purify his feed automatically. The implications could go deeper, to his current state of mind.