Forgery or Fark Up? Updating a wild one

Yesterday was an amazing day as the monumental screw up with the dates on a document that the KMT was using to smear Tsai Ing-wen totally backfired on the KMT. The Taipei Times had a thorough report....

At the Monday press conference, Liu and the KMT displayed a document that they said was distributed by the TaiMed Group (TMG), the predecessor of Yu Chang, at an investor conference on March 31, 2007, and said the presentation document listed Tsai as one of the four principal leaders of the start-up.

.........

At the morning press conference, Chen said Liu and the KMT might have committed forgery and may have violated Article 90 of the election act, which stipulates that anyone who spreads a rumor or false statement for the purpose of getting a candidate elected or impeding a person’s election chances could be sentenced to a fixed term of imprisonment of up to five years.

The document shown by Liu on Monday was actually a TaiMed Group presentation from Aug. 19, 2007, less than two weeks before the founding of Yu Chang on Sept. 5, Chen said, adding that Tsai’s name had been listed because she was a chairman-to-be after stepping down as vice premier in May.

As the TT notes, it was a day of press conferences followed by an evening of talk show madness. Liu said it was a minor mistake. One of those simple mistakes that accidentally turned a perfectly innocent set of moves into a nefarious plot by DPP Presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen to use government money to assure herself of big profits in private industry.

People First Party (PFP) legislators, of the party of Presidential candidate James Soong, were accusing the KMT of having a "black hand", a higher up running the plot using subordinates, such as poor Minister Liu. It's good to have another party in the Presidential elections to hack on the KMT.

The TT writes up the comments of one Yu Chang/TaiMed official defending Tsai here.

The pro-KMT English paper, the China Post, observed:

To date, Liu has not provided any details or explanations as to the incorrect date stamped on the CEPD's TaiMed investment briefing that was provided to the Legislative Yuan.

The public has a short attention span, and the case has now become a conflicting flow of names, dates, people, and funds.

The case took an ominous turn today as Taiwan News reported via UDN that special prosecutors were now on the case:

The Chinese-language United Evening News reported Wednesday that special investigators visited the NDF management offices late on Tuesday to browse and read all documents related to the Yu Chang case and two other related files. Since the cases were complicated, the investigators took materials back with them, the paper said.

The DPP has also filed suit against Minister Liu, three KMT lawmakers, and the wife of VP candidate Wu Den-yih, the last for making some particularly ugly and totally unfounded comments:

Apart from Liu, the DPP was suing Tsai Ling-yi, the wife of Ma’s running mate Premier Wu, because she claimed at a rally in Penghu on December 11 that the opposition candidate moved millions from Yu Chang into her own accounts.

KMT attack dog legislator Chiu Yi, who has made similar claims, is targeted in the suit.

As a friend of mine remarked yesterday, the KMT is still running against Chen Shui-bian, who is now old news, and has become old news because the KMT has silenced him in prison, instead of letting him out on appeal where he could cause all sorts of mischief and hurt the DPP's chances. In this case they are simply updating the target to Tsai Ing-wen, but it is essentially the same accusation that was made against Chen: pocketing government money (and one that Chen was found innocent of). The next step is making extravagant claims, creating a media circus, and hoping the stink can't be washed off.

This is a standard tactic that the KMT has used against DPP politicians since the Ma Administration took office (for a review, a post on a few cases here). Accuse them of malfeasance, then they are found innocent, but the stink lingers. Once again too we have a repeat of special prosecutors poking into party and individual accounts as an election looms -- as I've noted several times before, this gives every appearance of being intended as a fishing expedition to gain information about DPP finances and to see who is funding whom.

Meanwhile, though the KMT is attempting to extent the duration of this smear, the strangely dated document and the fact of a public apology should ensure it has a short, unhappy life. Good riddance, I say.
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Daily Links:

• Highest ranking US official in a decade visits Taiwan. No real news except the fact of the visit, which I hope is a harbinger of higher-ranking officials to come.
• Speaking of harbingers, Chinese fisherman stab Korean coast guardsmen who seize their vessels. 
• Party like its 1996: Taiwan National Policy foundation advisor claims US military officials fear China will test ICBM during elections, as a warning to the people of Taiwan to tell them who not to vote for. Everyone on the island already knows that Ma Ying-jeou prays five times a day in the direction of Beijing, and the CCP knows missile tests won't be necessary. 
• Speaking of giving credence to non-peer reviewed claims by scholars with unsupported, unprofessional, ideological axes to grind pimping long-ago refuted and dismissed claims, a pro-KMT 2-28 denier held a press conference in Washington attended by a couple dozen to announce that he had refuted the mainstream view on 2-28 and emphasize what a tiny, insignificant event 2-28 was, how hardly anyone died in it. The "scholar" who spoke has been on this Holocaust denial kick for years, as I noted in 2007 when he said it was all Japan's fault. 
• China offers Taiwan incentives if the nation votes for Ma: ".... could include setting up representative offices for the non-government bodies which handle talks, simplifying entry procedures for Taiwanese visiting China, or importing Taiwanese rice into China...." sound tasty, don't they?
• My man Drew adds a new member to his team: world please welcome Kit.

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