You can’t blame Donald Trump for filling Moon Jae-in’s cabinet with pro-Pyongyang ex-terrorists

Yesterday morning, I was surprised to learn that my tweets about Lee In-young’s master plan to get around sanctions and bail out Kim Jong-un made the Chosun Ilbo and are spreading around Korean YouTube. Because you hate reading long posts—even long posts that you really should read—I decided to hold back for today my examination of why Lee and his colleagues are so motivated to aid and abet Pyongyang’s sanctions-busting, and all of its plans for Seoul’s money. We might...

Our S Korean ally has a plan to bail Kim Jong-un out, but it’s no better than the rest of them

I really think South Korean President Moon Jae-in wants to bail Kim Jong-un out more than I want my next breath. Even before he was sworn in, he called for the reopening of Kaesong and other joint projects to ease the burden of U.S.-led sanctions. Once in office, he called for major investments in North Korea until a call from the Treasury Department scared his bankers away. He turned a blind eye to purchases of North Korean coal, and probably to the smuggling of luxury goods, into...

Why DOJ’s deferred prosecution of Essentra FZE is a good deal for it, & for us.

In the Washington suburbs, $665,112 will buy you a nice house, but not a mansion. A settlement with the Treasury Department for a civil penalty in that amount isn’t going to bankrupt a large multinational corporation. Its main impact on Essentra FZE, a UAE-based subsidiary of a British corporation that makes cigarette filters, may be in its access to financial services and legal fees, which would still be worth every penny if they exceeded the penalty. You could argue back...

Will there be another Trump-Kim summit? Who knows? Will it do any good? No.

Last Friday, I appeared alongside Scott Snyder of the Brookings Institution on the Voice of America’s Washington Talk, hosted by Connie Kim. You can watch the edited interview here (it’s in English, with Korean subtitles): N. Korea rejects the idea of another summit as Pres. Trump said he could meet with KJU if it was helpful. How significant was a S. Korean court’s ruling that ordered KJU to compensate former POWs for forced labor?@snydersas @CFR_Asia @freekorea_us join us https://t.co/iEY4zMXvhU —...

The N.Y. Times, the Ningpo 12, Minbyun & Yoon Mee-hyang: The Story Behind the Story

Warning: This one is a long read. There are a lot of threads to pull together. In the end, I believe the implications for South Korea’s democracy, the human rights of North Koreans, and the accuracy of the news you read are grave enough to justify the effort to write (and hopefully, to read) it. ~   ~   ~ Since the announcement of their group defection in April 2016, this blog has paid close attention to the case of the Ningpo...

Feds unseal 14-count indictment against 33 agents of sanctioned North Korean bank

The U.S. Attorney’s office for the District of Columbia has done it again. Today, its prosecutors unsealed indictments against 28 North Korean and 5 Chinese representatives of North Korea’s Foreign Trade Bank (FTB) who are or were posted in China, Russia, Libya, Thailand, Kuwait, and Austria. The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) designated the FTB for proliferation financing in 2013. The North Korea Sanctions Regulations later put additional restrictions on dealings with the North Korean financial industry....

Tim Shorrock spreads disinformation about biological warfare in Korea. That makes him a disinformant.

If you’re unfamiliar with self-described Marxist and journalist Tim Shorrock, consider yourself fortunate. But if you’re on Twitter and you’re interested in Korea, you’ve probably run across his tweets. You might even have been blocked by him. And while the world is wide enough for all sorts of kooky viewpoints (as Mao said, “Let a hundred flowers bloom,” as he pulled the cord and started his lawnmower), Shorrock was one of the first “journalists” to whom Moon Jae-in gave an...

OFAC’s new North Korea (sort of) designations

Today, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control published a colossal list of amendments to the North Korea designations on its list of Specially Designated Nationals—its sanctions blacklist for the financial industry. The amendments are requirements under the new Otto Warmbier North Korea Nuclear Sanctions and Enforcement Act, the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act, and the regulations promulgated under those authorities. Today’s announcement is an encouraging sign that the administration is feeling more pressure to enforce these...

On OFAC’s new North Korea Sanctions regulations

In the days since the Treasury Department announced its amendment to the North Korea sanctions regulations at 31 CFR Part 510, I’ve received at least half a dozen inquiries from journalists about what it means. Unfortunately for us all, today also marks the first day in almost three weeks, inclusive of weekends and holidays, that I did not work a significant amount overtime in my day job—currently, it involves responding to the nationwide coronavirus disaster declaration—so I’ll keep this post...

DOJ indicts 2 Chinese men for laundering stolen South Korean Bitcoin for North Korean hackers

Today, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia unsealed an indictment of two Chinese nationals, Tian Yinyin and Li Jiadong, charging them with money laundering and running an unlicensed money transmitting business, for laundering $100 million in stolen Bitcoin and Ether for North Korean hackers between July 2018 and April 2019. The indictment alleges that the $100 million was part of a $250 million take the Lazarus Group stole from four cryptocurrency exchanges, three of them in South...

Huawei & North Korea: Reading between the lines of EDNY’s new indictment

HUAWEI, WHICH WAS PREVIOUSLY INDICTED FOR eleven counts of conspiracy, bank fraud, wire fraud, violations of Iran sanctions, and money laundering (plus criminal forfeiture counts) now finds itself hit with a superseding indictment for sixteen counts of similar allegations by prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York, or EDNY. I’ve always been impressed with the quality of EDNY’s work. It’s a plucky, underrated little office that sits resentfully in the shadow of its more prestigious and prideful neighbor in...

Moon Jae-in’s Wednesday Night Massacre threatens the rule of law in Korea

IF ONLY HE’D MASSACRED THEM ON A SATURDAY NIGHT, the metaphor would have been impeccable. But when South Korea’s President, Moon Jae-in, directs his Justice Minister, Choo Mi-ae, to reassign 32 prosecutors as they closed in on political corruption in his office”four months before elections will decide whether his party will have a majority to pass laws or a supermajority to amend the Constitution”it should have been the biggest news since the impeachment of his predecessor, Park Geun-hye. Last night,...

The Warmbier Act could raise the pressure on Kim Jong-un dramatically, whether Donald Trump likes it or not

Kim Jong-un is wrapping Donald Trump’s Christmas present, and Putin and Xi Jinping say that Trump should lift the sanctions on Kim they’ve been violating anyway, but Congress just made those sanctions much tougher in a new bill, the Otto Warmbier North Korea Nuclear Sanctions and Enforcement Act, which just passed both houses of Congress as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2020, or NDAA. The bill is an updated version of the BRINK Act,...

Review: Sandra Fahy, “Dying for Rights,” Columbia University Press, 2019

“In a penicillin bottle I wrote her date of birth, the day she died, and her name. I hung the bottle around her neck. I tied her hair. [The other prisoners and I] tied her legs. Her arms. We wrapped her body in a plastic bag. This is what happens in a prison camp in North Korea. That’s how we wrapped the dead bodies. When the warehouse has twenty dead bodies, we take those bodies to a place called the...

Christine Ahn, Pak Chol, and the United Front Department

A week ago, I fisked a report by the NGO Korea Peace Now! about the impact of sanctions on the North Korean people, which at least some journalists covered without questioning its many factual or logical flaws. The report was calculated to absolve Pyongyang of the blame for seizing land and destroying crops the poor grow on it, for its massive diversion of resources from food to weapons, for exporting scarce food for cash, for the gross inequality Kim Jong-un...

Report: Kim Jong-un starves his people, America blamed, women hardest hit

It has now been five years since a U.N. Commission of Inquiry found exhaustive evidence of Pyongyang’s culpability for “crimes against humanity, arising from ‘policies established at the highest level of State,’” including “the inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation.” It has been less than a year since Human Rights Watch interviewed dozens of witnesses to find that North Korea’s government has built a pervasive culture of rape, where officials prey on women with impunity. But now, a group...

How South Korea’s “human rights lawyer” president waged a quiet war to silence North Korea human rights activists

The Chosun Ilbo has published a Korean-language interview with Lee Young-hwan, the head of the Transitional Justice Working Group, one of the most respected human rights groups researching Kim Jong-un’s crimes against humanity. Although TJWG is based in Seoul and headed by a Korean, it’s really an international NGO with both Korean and foreign staff. Lee has been an activist for human rights in the North since the late 1990s, and received a Democracy Award from the National Endowment for...

Judge holds Chinese banks in contempt, fines them $50K a day for failing to comply with North Korea subpoenas

If you haven’t already read my post about Chief Judge Beryl Howell’s order directing three Chinese banks to comply with federal grand jury and statutory subpoenas of their North Korea-related records, you should probably start there. Although the docket in this case is still sealed, I speculated in that post that the banks would likely appeal to the D.C. Circuit and seek a stay of the court’s order. And so they have, according to an order Judge Howell unsealed today....