Democratic Party of Korea leader Kim Min-seok speaks at a supreme council meeting at the National Assembly on Monday. [Yonhap]
Democratic Party of Korea leader Kim Min-seok speaks at a supreme council meeting at the National Assembly on Monday. [Yonhap]

The Democratic Party of Korea filed a complaint Monday with the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency against People Power Party lawmaker Ju Jin-woo on charges of defamation under the Act on Promotion of Information and Communications Network Utilization and Information Protection, criminal defamation through false statements, and false accusation.

The party's legal committee said in a press release that Ju had "seriously damaged the president's reputation by spreading blatant falsehoods with the intent to defame President Lee Jae Myung, and even went so far as to file a false accusation against the president."

The committee said Ju had spread false claims on Sept. 30 about a cropped line of text at the bottom of an image of a "daily comprehensive situation report" that President Lee had posted on SNS, alleging it was "a confession that he was receiving investigation updates from the special prosecutor overseeing the National Election Commission." The committee said the document was in fact "nothing more than a police security situation report from Olympic Park related to a ballot paper shortage — entirely unrelated to any investigation report from the NEC special prosecutor."

The committee added that Ju had on Oct. 1 filed a complaint against President Lee, claiming the document was classified and that posting its image on SNS constituted a leak of official secrets. The committee rejected that claim, saying the contents were information "that can and should be shared with the public," and that disclosing them "cannot constitute a leak of official secrets." It noted that courts have consistently ruled that a document qualifies as an official secret only when its disclosure would cause substantive harm to the national interest.

"Lawmaker Ju has repeatedly made groundless false claims, deceiving the public and defaming President Lee Jae Myung," the committee said. "The Democratic Party has therefore filed a complaint with the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency over his defamation and false accusation."

Yang Bu-nam, the Democratic Party lawmaker who chairs the legal committee, said a person who had served as a legal secretary under the Yoon Suk Yeol administration "could not possibly be unaware that his claims were false." Yang called on judicial authorities to "strictly punish, in accordance with the law and principles, the act of falsely defaming and filing a complaint against the president for political gain."


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