한겨레·South Korea·

[Deep dive] Lee’s self-inflicted special counsel problem

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President Lee Jae-myung speaks at a meeting of presidential advisers at the Blue House on Nov. 5, 2026. (pool photo)

Koreans tend to have a naive view of the presidency. They expect that electing the right person will bring about great progress both for the nation and in people’s lives.

Ever since Korea moved to a single five-year presidential term in 1987, voters have placed enormous hopes in every incoming president — and every time, they have been disappointed. None of those presidents lived up to those unrealistic expectations.

What does that mean for President Lee Jae Myung?

There were two reasons Koreans elected him president.

First, he was in the right place at the right time.

After losing the presidential election in March 2022, Lee won a seat in the National Assembly and became leader of the Democratic Party. He survived the fervent efforts of prosecutors under the Yoon Suk-yeol administration to put him behind bars.

So when Yoon basically blew up his own presidency with his martial law declaration on Dec. 3, 2024, it was only natural that Lee would have his time to shine.

The second reason is that Lee embodied Koreans’ vision of the ideal president. He worked in a factory as a teenage boy, entered university with the equivalent of a high school diploma and went on to become a lawyer.

After a stint in activism, Lee entered politics and served as mayor of Seongnam and governor of Gyeonggi Province. His sterling record in those positions paved the way for his run for president.

It was a bootstraps story like none other, which perhaps made it inevitable that Koreans would entrust the presidency to someone like him.

For his first year in office, Lee lived up to the public’s expectations. He filled spots on the Cabinet with serious politicians and reassured the public with his pragmatic centrism. Live broadcasts of Cabinet meetings kept bureaucrats on their toes and instilled a sense of dynamism into his administration.

As luck would have it, a semiconductor boom sent stock prices soaring. Lee’s approval ratings climbed.

But the good times did not last. The turning point came a year after Lee took office, with the defeat of his Democratic Party in the Seoul mayoral election on June 3. His approval spiraled downward as moderates, the younger generation and Seoul area residents deserted in droves.

As Lee’s popularity fell, he began to face criticism from figures such as Jung Chung-rae, Rhyu Si-min and Kim Ou-joon, representing the Democratic Party’s base. The live Cabinet broadcasts that had proved so popular early in his presidency began wearing thin for participants and viewers alike. There was even a self-defeating debate about whether the heads of the prosecution service and the Serious Crime Investigation Agency should attend those meetings.

Lee responded to such setbacks with irritation and overuse of social media. He stirred up hostility and xenophobia with comments about migrant workers and multicultural families — hardly suitable subjects for the presidential agenda.

Some see his comments as representing a strategy to broaden his appeal among centrists. At a press conference on Oct. 19, Lee himself advanced the theory of a “structural majority,” arguing that embracing centrists and conservatives is the only way for the progressive camp to achieve its desired reforms.

In my eyes, however, he seems to have lost his way, ricocheting between his base and the far right.

On Nov. 2, Vision Korea published a poll on Lee’s use of social media (conducted Oct. 31-Nov. 1 through an automated telephone survey). Just 36.2% of respondents viewed his social media use as positive, with 58.8% taking a negative view. (More details can be found on the website of the National Election Survey Deliberation Commission.)

With numbers like these, Lee needs to cut back on social media and take a more measured and meticulous approach to public communication.

Yet Lee has shown no inclination to reduce either social media activity or live Cabinet broadcasts. He seems to be digging in his heels, as though daring his critics to make his day. I have to wonder what is behind his obstinacy, which has little chance of boosting his ratings.

On Nov. 6, 2026, Korea’s National Assembly passed a bill to appoint a special counsel to investigate allegations that numerous government agencies conspired to bring trumped-up charges during the administration of Yoon Suk-yeol. (Kim Chae-woon/Hankyoreh)

The latest troubles for Lee involve a newly passed law authorizing a special counsel to investigate allegations of fabricated indictments, as well as the nomination of a justice minister from Lee’s inner circle in Seongnam.

The legislation passed by the National Assembly on Friday is formally titled the “Bill on the Appointment of a Special Counsel to Investigate Allegations of Fabricated Investigations and Prosecutions by the Prosecution Service, National Intelligence Service, Board of Audit and Inspection, and Other Agencies under the Yoon Suk-yeol Administration.”

There are legitimate grounds for the special counsel. During his presidency, Yoon, as a former prosecutor general himself, marshaled the prosecution service, the National Intelligence Service and the Board of Audit and Inspection to serve as his personal attack dogs.

The public prosecutors in particular hounded then-Democratic Party leader Lee Jae Myung and former President Moon Jae-in with politically motivated investigations, ransacking their closets for skeletons and filing unreasonable indictments. There should obviously be a full accounting for their behavior.

The bill’s statement of purpose reads as follows: “Although the facts behind these allegations have mostly been established through a parliamentary probe, we can hardly expect fair and objective investigations from investigative agencies, such as the prosecution service, which are themselves implicated in the allegations or have other conflicts of interest. The public is also highly concerned over the possibility of a concerted attempt to conceal or downplay wrongdoing.”

“Accordingly, the bill seeks to appoint a special counsel with independent authority and investigative capabilities to get to the bottom of the allegations of fabricated investigations and indictments under the Yoon Suk-yeol administration, to rigorously assess criminal responsibility for the unlawful acts committed, to repair the reputations of the victims, to restore the constitutional principles of the rule of law and justice in the courts and to prevent further abuses of prosecutorial power.”

During a Nov. 5 meeting of the National Assembly’s Special Committee on Budget and Accounts, Rep. Han Dong-hoon, an opposition lawmaker, accused the ruling party of trying to install “a special counsel to protect those in power.”

Hong Ihk-pyo, the Blue House’s senior secretary for political affairs, retorted that the investigation would focus on “prosecutors who abused their authority in the previous administration.”

Hong then threw down the gauntlet to Han, who served as justice minister under Yoon: “Don’t you think your tenure as justice minister helped bring about this situation and ultimately led to the dismantling of the prosecution service? Don’t you feel any responsibility for that?”

I believe Hong is right. The special counsel ought to carry out a bold and thorough investigation to establish the truth and punish those responsible.

But whether the special counsel’s mission is legitimate is a separate question from whether it is feasible.

Former Justice Minister Jung Sung-ho made the following observation on the Friday edition of an MBC current events show hosted by Kim Jong-bae.

“There certainly were investigations that went too far, but the difficulty was determining whether that in itself could be characterized as fabrication — whether you could draw that direct connection,” he said.

“Personally, I think that there were serious problems with investigations themselves into the Daejang case and the case about remittances to North Korea. That said, it won’t be easy to prove that evidence was fabricated through a judicial process.”

Jung hits the nail on the head.

Is there a special counsel out there that could possibly have both the will and the skill needed to prove that the prosecution service was trumping up charges under Yoon? Even if a special counsel were to indict high-ranking prosecutors, would any court choose to convict?

If the special counsel fails to achieve its stated objective, then the political backlash will fall squarely on Lee and his Democratic Party — not a great position to be in ahead of the general elections in April 2028.

The reason this special counsel business has been bungled is that Lee himself has been far too fixated on getting the indictments against him dropped. Democratic lawmakers formed an entire group to get those indictments dropped, and in the process conflated that objective with a fact-finding investigation into trumped-up charges. It was all built on a flawed premise.

If they had launched a special counsel probe into the fabricated indictments when Lee’s approval was high and avoided any reference to getting the charges dropped, things likely would have been fine. But it’s too late for that now.

Lee Yong-cheol, the minister of the Defense Acquisition Program Administration, takes an oath while appearing before the National Assembly’s National Defense Committee on Oct. 13, 2026. (Yoon Woon-sik/Hankyoreh)

Lee’s choice to tap Lee Yong-cheol, an old pal from his Seongnam days, to be justice minister seems to me a misstep that will come back to haunt the president politically as well.

The Prosecution Service Act lays out that the justice minister “shall, as a chief superintendent to supervise prosecutorial affairs, direct and supervise prosecutors in general, and with respect to specific cases, direct and supervise only the Prosecutor General.” That means that if Lee Yong-cheol becomes justice minister, he will be able to give a directive that indictments against the president be dropped.

While this is legally possible, it is politically suicidal. I’m curious to see what Lee Yong-cheol will have to say about having the charges against the president dropped during his confirmation hearing.

While watching this controversy unfold, I often think that Lee Jae Myung would do well to take some lessons from President Kim Dae-jung, who was charged with conspiring to commit insurrection by the Chun Doo-hwan junta and sentenced to death by the Supreme Court. It was only once Kim was out of the Blue House that he sought a retrial and received an acquittal. Here’s what he had to say about his decision in his memoir:

“On Jan. 29, 2004, I attended the reading of the verdict in the retrial on my conspiracy to insurrection case. Some 23 years after being handed a death sentence, I was acquitted. Following the reading of the verdict, I stated my piece: ‘The law has brought the Chun regime to justice. I have realized once more that the people and history will always be victorious.’ It was my thought that a legal judgment about the Chun regime’s destruction of the constitutional order was necessary for the sake of the generations to come and the course of history. I did not seek a retrial while I was in office as president because I did not want to impose an undue burden on the judiciary. I hoped that the day would come that the junta court’s reckless verdict from 1980 would be made null and void, proving that justice and history prevail. My attorney, Choi Jae-cheon, worked tirelessly; his arguments were clear and to the point.”

Lee Jae Myung isn’t Kim Dae-jung, and the eras they lived in and the contexts they each faced were different as well. Comparing the two is futile. Nevertheless, I can’t help but strongly feel that Lee is doing himself a disservice by not gleaning some wisdom from Kim.

But it’s too late for that now. Hopefully, Lee finds a way to navigate this thorny issue.

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