Seoul Court Sentences Ex-Spy Chief and Former Presidential Secretary Over Martial Law Documents
A Seoul court on Thursday sentenced former National Intelligence Service (NIS) Director Cho Tae-yong to 1 1/2 years in prison for perjury and other offenses connected to former President Yoon Suk Yeol's brief imposition of martial law in December 2024. The Seoul Central District Court found Cho guilty of making false statements at the Constitutional Court and creating false public documents.
Cho had testified in a National Assembly hearing that he did not receive orders from Yoon to arrest politicians during the martial law period. The court also convicted him of submitting written testimonies that contained false information. The sentence fell short of the seven-year term sought by special counsel Cho Eun-suk's team, which had indicted the former spy chief on additional charges including dereliction of duty.
The prosecution had argued that Cho failed to report Yoon's martial law plan to the National Assembly despite allegedly hearing about a plan to mobilize troops to seal off the assembly and arrest politicians, a duty required by law for the NIS director. The court acquitted Cho on that charge, saying it could not rule out that he may have dismissed the plan as a rumor.
In delivering the sentence, the court said, "The defendant made false statements and created false public documents in order to reduce his own responsibility," adding that "the nature of the crime is not light."
In a separate case, the same court on Thursday sentenced former presidential secretary Kang Eui-gu to 18 months in prison for drafting a false document related to Yoon's martial law bid. Kang was found guilty of creating a cover for Yoon's martial law proclamation on Dec. 6, 2024, three days after the declaration. The court accepted the special counsel's argument that Kang collected signatures from Yoon, then-Prime Minister Han Duck-soo, and then-Defense Minister Kim Yong-hyun to give the declaration an appearance of procedural legitimacy.
The court noted that Kang, "after becoming aware of the error that martial law took place without a document containing the president's signature and countersignatures of Cabinet members, newly drafted a cover that did not exist for the already distributed proclamation to conceal the error." Kang was acquitted on charges of exercising the false document, as he had merely stored it in a desk before destroying it.
The rulings follow earlier convictions of Yoon and Han on charges of drafting a false document in their separate trials.