The president's escape act

Chin Jung-kwon

The author is a professor at Kwangwoon University.

Harry Houdini’s escape acts made the illusionist a legend. He did not rely on devices to deceive audiences. Instead, he entered contraptions and demonstrated his ability to escape. Handcuffs, shackles, straitjackets and water-filled milk cans could not hold him.

President Lee Jae Myung’s art of political survival brings Houdini to mind. His ability to slip out of traps that might have ended another politician’s career is remarkable. Other politicians would have been finished when recordings of their profanity became public. Or when people around them took their own lives or were arrested, they would have abandoned politics out of moral obligation.

Had the courts followed the so-called 6-3-3 rule in his election-law trial, Lee might have been unable to continue in politics. Had a court not rejected an arrest warrant, he might have gone to prison. Had he accepted responsibility for losing the presidential election and declined another term as party leader, he might be out of politics by now.

He has been lucky. Who imagined Yoon Suk Yeol would self-destruct? Without Yoon’s foolish attempt at a coup, the semiconductor supercycle would have been his achievement.

But society has paid dearly to watch Lee’s escape magic. Standards for public service have eroded. When someone facing five criminal trials can become president, criminal allegations cease to be much of an obstacle to public office.

Lee’s escape act has now entered its second season — one more dangerous than the first because the survival artist now occupies the country’s highest office and wields immense power. His escape tricks have become statecraft, and canceling prosecutions and constitutional revision allowing presidential re-election have become governing priorities.

Was there debate over policies or agendas at the Democratic Party’s convention in August? Instead, there was a clash between those calling cancellation of prosecutions “insane” and those acting as the president’s avatars, declaring that requiring an indicted person to stand trial is “violence and barbarism disguised as justice.”

Consider the Cabinet reshuffle. The key appointment is justice minister nominee Kim Seung-won. At an acquaintance’s request, he texted the head of the food and drug safety agency; a clinical trial involving a substance that killed laboratory rats was then approved. Is such a person fit to be justice minister?

During the Lone Star arbitration dispute, Kim attacked then-Justice Minister Han Dong-hoon’s decision to appeal. Had Kim been justice minister then, would he have abandoned the appeal and risked 7 trillion won ($5.1 billion) in taxpayers’ money?

Yet the president nominated him anyway. Kim represented Nam Wook in the Daejang-dong case, closely tied to Lee, and helped lead a party advocating for the cancellation of prosecutions. Will his nomination not lead to him accomplishing Lee’s long-held goal after his predecessor washed his hands of it?

The attack on the judiciary follows the same logic. Democratic Party leader Kim Min-seok recently ordered banners nationwide to demand Chief Justice Jo Hee-de’s resignation. The ruling party leader is acting like the head of the Red Guards, who protect the supreme leader. Is this a normal country?

Behind the uproar is a Seoul High Court judge, formerly associated with the progressive Our Law Research Association, who acquitted Kim Man-bae, a central figure in the Daejang-dong scandal. The apparent aim is to fill all 22 Supreme Court seats — which will become available during Lee’s term — with favorable justices. This, too, extends the president’s courtroom escape act.

The Jang Yun-gi case, in which police were accused of systematically concealing evidence, starkly exposed the dangers of “prosecution reform.” But the government still pushed ahead with abolishing prosecutors’ supplementary investigative authority. Perhaps demonizing prosecutors, regardless of public sentiment, helps justify canceling prosecutions.

Constitutional complaints against court judgments and the abolition of breach-of-trust offenses are additional escape routes. Whatever one may say, this escape plan is meticulous. The public will bear its cost, but to this president, apparently no one’s predicament is more urgent than his own.

His intention is no longer a secret. The magician can openly reveal the trick because he is president and nobody can stop him. Season one’s “catch me if you can” has become “stop me if you can.”

And Houdini? He escaped every kind of restraint, only to die after an ill-fated demonstration of his ability to withstand blows to the abdomen.