Saenuri illegally got transcript: Report
Left: Kim Moo-sung, right, a Saenuri Party rep, talks with Choi Kyung-hwan, left, Saenuri’s floor leader, yesterday in the main conference hall of the National Assembly in Yeouido, western Seoul. [NEWSIS] Right: Kim Han-gill, right, chairman of the Democratic Party, talks with Jun Byung-hun, left, DP’s floor leader, yesterday in the DP lawmakers’ meeting in the National Assembly. By Kim Kyung-bin
Kim Moo-sung, a Saenuri lawmaker based in Busan who was the director of Park’s campaign for the December presidential election last year, obtained the transcript of the 2007 inter-Korean summit, a classified document stored both in the National Intelligence Service and the National Archives, ahead of the race, several Saenuri members told reporters on Wednesday.
The members said Kim attended a closed-door meeting with senior party members on Wednesday and told them that he had already read the transcript before the December race.
Allegedly, Kim said “the content [of the transcript] was so shocking that my hands were shaking.”
He also allegedly asked Won Sei-hoon, then-chief of the NIS, to declassify the transcript for the public, but Won rejected it.
After reading the transcript, Kim was “upset.” He “read it out in front of people at around 3 p.m. during the campaign in Busan on a rainy day ahead of the election.”
The liberal online newspaper Pressian confirmed that Kim made such a revelation during his speech in Busan, on Dec. 14, 2012, for Saenuri contender Park.
At the time, the Saenuri Party had been attacking the Democrats after Chung Moon-hun, a Saenuri Party lawmaker who was a presidential secretary for unification affairs under the Lee Myung-bak administration, said in October 2012 that Roh told Kim Jong-il that he didn’t recognize the NLL as a boundary and a transcript existed of the conversation between them.
“Ladies and gentlemen, what I’m going to tell you now is about [former] President Roh Moo-hyun’s humiliating remarks to Kim Jong-il, which is a hot issue these days,” Kim said, according to the audio file attached to the article on the Pressian’s Web site. “As a representative of the Republic of Korea, here I will reveal everything he said.”
And then he read from a document that summarized some of the information from the full transcript that the NIS declassified on Monday: Roh’s support for North Korea’s nuclear weapons program; NLL having no “legal or logical basis”; the matter of sanctioning Banco Delta Asia is “a mistake” by the United States; and criticism of U.S. “imperialist history.”
Wrapping up his speech, Kim denounced then-opposition party rival Moon Jae-in, who accompanied him at the 2007 summit as the chief presidential secretary.
The Democratic Party attacked Kim, saying it was illegal for him, who is not a member of the National Assembly’s Intelligence Committee, to open and reveal a state secret.
“It proved that then-candidate Park Geun-hye and the Saenuri Party abused state power and conducted illegal acts, obsessed with winning the presidential election,” Bae Jae-jeung, a spokeswoman of the DP, said on Wednesday. “Kim should reveal how he obtained the transcript at the time and his [alleged] contact points in the NIS.”
Kim denied the allegation that he obtained such a transcript.
“As the matter of the NLL was such a hot issue at the time, I just asked Representative Chung Moon-hun about the content [of the transcript],” Kim said.
BY KIM HEE-JIN [heejin@joongang.co.kr]
with the Korea JoongAng Daily
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