President Yoon Suk-yeol’s chief of staff remarked Tuesday that the president had made “four sincere apologies” about the deadly crowd crush that took place in the Itaewon neighborhood of Seoul in October of last year.

“What more could he do to apologize or express his condolences?” asked Kim Dae-ki, Yoon’s chief of staff.

Kim was responding to Lee Yong-bin, a lawmaker with the main opposition Democratic Party, who said during an audit of the presidential office on Tuesday by the National Assembly’s Steering Committee that Yoon needed to make a sincere expression of condolences for the Itaewon tragedy.

As for why Yoon didn’t attend a civic memorial on the first anniversary of the tragedy, which was held at Seoul Plaza on Oct. 29, Kim said there was too much “risk” because the Democratic Party had ordered the “full mobilization” of all affiliated civic groups.

Kim also denied a report claiming that the ruling People Power Party’s push to have Gimpo, a city in Gyeonggi Province, incorporated into Seoul was the result of communication with the presidential office.

But when Kim Han-kyu, a Democratic lawmaker, remarked that “policies are all over the place and are being decided willy-nilly,” the chief of staff shot back, “A decision isn’t necessarily slapdash just because it wasn’t deliberated by the party and the government.”

“Administrative districts aren’t mandated in the Constitution, nor are they handed down from heaven. The PPP’s policy bureau is capable of developing policy, which is why the expression ‘slapdash’ is incorrect,” Kim Dae-ki added.

Kim Byung-joo, a lawmaker with the Democratic Party, brought up New York Times reporting from April claiming that the CIA was wiretapping Korea’s National Security Office. “Somebody here is a spy,” the lawmaker said, referring to the staff at the presidential office, before adding that “work should be done to ferret out that spy.”

The remarks provoked a quarrel between the two parties.

Kim Byung-joo asserted that when the Korean police declined to pursue a complaint that civic groups had filed on the issue, the police wrote in their decision that the presidential office had fully denied allegations of wiretapping by the US and said that information had been leaked not through SIGINT (signals intelligence, typically using cutting-edge technology) but through HUMINT (human intelligence, gathered by human sources).

“If major state policies were passed to another country by human sources, that’s espionage,” Kim said.

Cho Tae-yong, Korea’s national security advisor, retorted that the “so-called presidential office’s position in the police’s decision wasn’t factual.”

“Accusing someone [of being a spy] would be deeply insulting, and leveling that accusation against a member of the president’s secretariat or national security office would be an even bigger issue,” Cho said.

“There’s a line that shouldn’t be crossed,” said Kim Sung-won, the PPP’s ranking member on the Steering Committee.

By Bae Ji-hyun, staff reporter; Kang Jae-gu, staff reporter

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