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What the prosecutors’ special office of investigations turned up after two months of investigating Choi Sun-sil’s influence peddling was that the Blue House was run as opaquely as a family-owned company. “The only way to understand the relationships between these people - which have lasted from 20 years at the shortest to 40 years at the longest - is to see Choi Sun-sil as the authoritarian husband who gives the orders, President Park Geun-hye as the wife and the doorknob triumvirate as the cousins,” said a source in the prosecutors who read the investigation findings on Dec. 12.

The decision-making process at the “family-owned company” known as the Blue House made it virtually impossible for Blue House senior secretaries and other presidential aides to give information to Park without going through the doorknob triumvirate. Park’s former personal secretary Jung Ho-seong would often send written briefings containing this information to Park and Choi simultaneously and then relay instructions from Choi to Park. Park would then convey the instructions decided in this manner to former Blue House Senior Secretary for Policy Coordination Ahn Jong-beom over the phone, who busily scribbled them down without even knowing how those decisions had been made.

Even Special Prosecutor Park Young-soo and his associates reportedly believe that the only way to unravel the various strands of this scandal is to take the view that the suspects formed a group that was so tight-knit that they even managed their assets together.

It appears that the only person that the doorknob triumvirate allowed to cross the threshold into this inner circle was Woo Byung-woo, former Blue House Senior Secretary of Civil Affairs. “It‘s very likely that former Blue House Public Relations Secretary Ahn Bong-geun and former Blue House Administrative Affairs Secretary Lee Jae-man got help from Woo when they were in trouble. That’s probably what allowed Woo to cling to his position at the Blue House for so long,” said a source with the prosecutors special investigation team.

Woo was allowed into the inner circle in exchange for using his influence in the prosecutors and other investigative authorities to do favors for the doorknob triumvirate, but Woo was also clever enough to figure out the doorknob triumvirate‘s vulnerabilities, the source said. This is something that merits further investigation by the special prosecutor and his team.

The investigation findings that the prosecutors released on Dec. 12 indicate that the text messages and recordings of mobile phone calls by Jung Ho-seong that are in the prosecutors’ possession contain conclusive evidence that Choi was the highest person in the hierarchy of power. There was even one time that Blue House senior secretaries convened for a meeting just 12 hours after Choi made the request, even though they had not met for a month prior to that.

Choi was not just Park‘s stylist, attending to her hair and her outfits, but was meticulously involved in running the country. One example of this was the meeting of Blue House senior secretaries held three days before Park took a trip to Europe on Nov. 2, 2013. In the recording of a phone call acquired by the prosecutors that Choi made to Jung around Oct. 29 or Oct. 30, Choi mentions how public opinion is getting worse and instructs Park to hold a press conference before she goes on the trip. When Jung responds that there is no precedent for holding a press conference before the president goes abroad, Choi tells him to hold a cabinet meeting or if that isn’t possible to hold a meeting of Blue House senior secretaries. Jung waffles, complaining about the difficulty of organizing such a meeting, at which point Choi tells him to “cut the crap and get on it.”

With public opinion souring over the National Intelligence Service (NIS) online comment scandal during the 2012 presidential election campaign, Blue House senior secretaries had not been holding their regular Monday meeting for four weeks in a row. But on the morning of Oct. 31, 2013, just 12 hours after Choi gave Jung his orders, the Blue House senior secretaries convened. During their meeting, Park promised that there would be a thorough investigation of the allegations of meddling in the election by the NIS and other government bodies and that the guilty parties would be held responsible. Afterward, it turns out, Jung sent a text message to Choi saying, “Sure enough, things worked out just like you said. Thanks!”

There were also reportedly text messages on Jung’s mobile phone that back up allegations that Choi entered the Blue House without a pass. On Dec. 11, the investigating prosecutors announced that Choi had used the vehicle of a Blue House official to visit the Blue House more than 10 times between Mar. 2013 and Nov. 2013.

Messages exchanged between Jung and other administrators reportedly show that when former Blue House administrator Lee Yeong-seon told Jung before Choi reached the Blue House that she would be entering in a few minutes, Jung and the other two members of the doorknob triumvirate got ready for her arrival. The protocol for Choi’s arrival was handled by the office that had originally handled the first lady.

During the investigation into documents leaked about Chung Yoon-hoi in 2014, former police superintendent Park Kwang-cheon said that “Choi Sun-sil is the most powerful person in the country, Chung Yoon-hoi is the second most powerful and Park is only the third most powerful.” “He wasn‘t wrong about Choi being the most powerful person. Some of the prosecutors think that Choi was the de facto president,” said a source with the prosecutors.

By Seo Young-ji, staff reporter

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