First lady Kim Keon-hee and Myung Tae-kyun. (Hankyoreh file photo)
Continued leaks of audio recordings between first lady Kim Keon-hee and Myung Tae-kyun — a key figure in allegations that Kim interfered in nominations for elected office — suggest that the first lady not only meddled with People Power Party (PPP) nominations in the by-election of June 2022 but in the local elections that directly followed the launch of her husband’s administration. Moreover, the conversations suggest that Kim has inserted herself into the administration of standard state affairs. Audio files released on Tuesday suggest that Myung acted as an unofficial power broker to help the first lady meddle with opinion polls ahead of the latest Seoul mayoral election; interfere with the PPP’s internal affairs; and draft a report concerning an industrial complex in Changwon. Critics are calling for a thorough investigation into the details of the allegations. The allegations of political interference tying Myung to the first lady began with former PPP lawmaker Kim Young-sun receiving the party’s nomination for Changwon’s Uichang District in the 2022 by-election. In March 2022, ahead of the presidential election, Myung conducted 81 public polls regarding the presidential race through the Future Korea Research Institute, a polling center that he effectively ran. Kang Hye-kyeong, a former employee at the polling agency and the former chief accountant for Kim Young-sun, has claimed that President Yoon Suk-yeol and the first lady secured the PPP nomination for Kim Young-sun instead of paying Myung the standard fee for conducting the polls (around 370 million won, or US$267,400). Last month, a phone conversation between Myung and Kang the day before the nomination (May 9, 2022) was released. During the conversation, Myung said: “I called madam [the first lady] and the president, and the president said, ‘I told them Kim Young-sun.’ So Yoon Sang-hyun is finished.” At the time, Yoon Sang-hyun was the chair of the PPP party nomination committee and opposed Kim Young-sun’s nomination.Eight days before Kim Young-sun’s nomination was announced (May 2, 2022), Myung said: “The first lady just called. She told me how grateful she is to me, and to not worry about [the nomination of] Kim Young-sun. She expressed her gratitude.” “She said it’s her gift to me,” Myung can be heard saying. This conversation was released on Monday. The audio files and the circumstantial evidence point to Myung and the first lady making a deal: Myung would conduct the polls, and the first lady would secure a nomination for Kim Young-sun. In an additional conversation released on Tuesday, Myung can be heard saying on May 30, 2022: “Get 1,000 survey responses for Seoul and the mayoral race. Ask people about party and candidate. We need responses from 1,000 people, and we need it today. Madam [that is, Kim Keon-hee] said she’s curious about it, so please run the survey.” When Myung says the first lady is “curious,” this doesn’t appear to be a reference to simple inquisitiveness. The local elections held that year directly followed President Yoon Suk-yeol’s inauguration, making them the first nationwide elections under the new administration. Lee Jun-seok, the former PPP leader who is now the head of the Reform Party, has recently come out and said that there were “suspicions at the time of the first lady’s interference in party nominations.” “When a party’s leader rationally tells the head of the party’s internal nomination committee that ‘this is improper,’ but the head of that committee basically ignores him, you can’t help but think that there was some sort of outside pressure,” Lee has said. At the time, the head of the PPP’s internal nomination committee was Chung Jin-suk, the current chief of staff to the president. All of these revelations align with a KakaoTalk conversation between Kim Keon-hee and Myung that the latter released on Oct. 15, in which the first lady tells Myung: “I’m completely reliant on you right now” and “I think you have the most incredible eye for such things.” The conversation essentially reveals that after Myung won the first lady over with his skills for manipulating polls, the two developed a relationship that mimicked a political partnership. This relationship and mutual trust appear to have lasted until April of this year, when the general election was held. During a phone conversation with Kang Hye-kyeong on Nov. 13 of last year, Myung can be heard saying, “I heard that Kim Young-sun was dead last in internal party audits.” “It was probably Yoon Han-hong ordering the party to remove [Kim Young-sun] and everybody else. I contacted the first lady. I also told Kim Young-sun to contact the first lady, so she’ll probably take care of it,” he goes on to say. “This is the last time I’m helping them. I sent the first lady a detailed text. She will help out, but this is the last time I’m helping them,” Myung added. Myung was referring to the PPP’s internal review of nominations and appointments for the April general elections, and Kim Young-sun was effectively cut off during this process.The fact that Myung ordered a report on the Changwon National Industrial Complex for the sake of reporting to Kim Keon-hee suggests that the first lady exercised influence not only over political affairs, but administrative ones as well. As the formal decision to move forward with the Changwon complex project came out during an emergency meeting on economics and livelihoods chaired by Yoon on March 15, 2023, it will need to be shown whether Kim Keon-hee exerted any influence over the decision. “Myung’s involvement in not only People Power Party nominations, but the selection of the Changwon industrial complex worth 1.4 trillion won wouldn’t have been possible without Kim Keon-hee,” said Kang Yu-jung, a lawmaker with the Democratic Party. “A special counsel must hold to account those pulling the strings behind elections and national projects — two things in which fairness is paramount — as if they were the spoils of war,” she said. By Kim Wan, staff reporter; Kwak Jin-san, staff reporterPlease direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]
