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Seok Dong-hyeon, a legal adviser to President Yoon Suk-yeol as he faces suspicions of orchestrating an insurrection, answers questions from the press outside the Seoul High Prosecutors’ Office on Dec. 19, 2024. (Yonhap)

Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol, who is accused of being the ringleader of an insurrection, had his legal representatives deny all charges against him.

Amid an outpouring of testimony from other participants in the martial law declaration, Yoon nonchalantly denies all of it. That gives the lie to his pledge not to dodge legal or political responsibility for his abortive martial law declaration.

Yoon had plenty to say when he was trying to incite his followers to rise up on his behalf. But as investigators are closing in on him, he’s scrambling to stay out of custody like a petty criminal. How could the president, of all people, be such a coward?

“The president comes from a legal background. I have heard myself that he never used the words ‘arrest’ and ‘drag out,’” said Seok Dong-hyeon, the head of Yoon’s legal team, in a press conference on Thursday. Seok added that Yoon had told him he’d “never once so much as uttered the word ‘arrest.’”

Yoon’s words directly contradict testimony by Cho Ji-ho, the commissioner general of the Korean National Police Agency, and Lt. Gen. Kwak Jong-geun, head of the Special Warfare Command, that they’d personally received orders from Yoon to “drag out” the lawmakers from the main chamber of the National Assembly.

But testimony about Yoon’s orders continues to accumulate.

Lt. Gen. Lee Jin-woo, the chief of the Capital Defense Command, who sent about 200 military police to the National Assembly after martial law was declared, testified to prosecutors that he’d received a phone call from Yoon ordering him to “drag out” lawmakers while he was at the National Assembly.

When lawmakers were about to pass a resolution demanding that martial law be lifted, Yoon reportedly called Lee again to scold him for failing to drag out the lawmakers.

The reason Yoon denies giving any orders to block the National Assembly’s passage of the resolution and to arrest members of the National Assembly is because those are the key factors that will determine whether or not he’s guilty of insurrection.

Both the Criminal Act and Supreme Court precedent define subversion of the Constitution — one of the components of the crime of insurrection — as overthrowing by force constitutionally established bodies of state or making it impossible for those bodies to exercise their authority.

When former Presidents Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo were tried in 1997 for the coup they carried out on Dec. 12, 1979, the Supreme Court said that subversion of the Constitution “does not only mean abolishing such bodies but also includes making it impossible for those bodies to carry out their proper function for a substantial period of time.”

The object of Yoon’s orders was to neutralize the National Assembly and prevent lawmakers from passing a resolution to end martial law. If he’s charged with insurrection, he’s unlikely to avoid a guilty verdict.

Yoon’s evasive maneuvers are part of a legal strategy of avoiding the charge of insurrection, which is punishable by death or life in prison.

It looks like the man who threw the country into crisis with his outdated declaration of martial law is now set on saving his own skin. How humiliating to have such a man as president. 

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