Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) presidential candidate Frank Hsieh's (
The Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times' sister newspaper) said in a front page story yesterday that the Hsieh camp had been informed late on Thursday night of Ma's move to send an unnamed aide to the AIT.
At a press conference yesterday morning, the Hsieh camp declined to reveal its informant and did not name the aide, but said it had tried to verify the information it obtained through the AIT and "other reliable channels," the report said.
"We were concerned when we heard the response from the AIT, which told us it could not confirm it. The AIT did not deny it either. We thought there must be something fishy going on," Hsieh's spokesman Chao Tien-lin (趙天麟) told the press conference.
When approached by reporters for comment at a campaign event in Taipei's Da'an Park, Ma said he had not sent any aides to the AIT on Thursday to fill out public Form I-407 for him.
Ma accused the Hsieh camp of making false accusations for political gains.
"It's totally untrue," Ma said, accusing a "certain newspaper" of cooperating with Hsieh's camp by spreading rumors to manipulate voters.
Hsieh has alleged that Ma still has a valid US green card because he never completed a Form I-407 to relinquish his permanent residency in the US, nor has a US immigration court invalidated his card.
Ma has repeatedly dismissed the claim, saying that his green card automatically became invalid in the late 1980s after he started traveling to the US on visitor's visas.
The Central Election Commission said on Feb. 15 that it would employ the help of foreign diplomatic missions in Taiwan to check whether either of the two presidential candidates holds foreign citizenship. Both have formally consented to the probe.
Ma's campaign team held a press conference at his campaign headquarter's yesterday morning, rebutting the Liberty Times' report.
Ma's spokesman Tsai Shih-ping (蔡詩萍) accused the Hsieh camp of making false accusations and said Hsieh and his staff should apologize.
The Ma camp wants nothing to do with Hsieh's smear tactics, Tsai said.
Hsieh's camp responded by holding a second press conference, during which Chao identified Ma's aide only as a former diplomat surnamed Feng, who had been instructed by Ma to go to the AIT.
Feng was at the AIT all afternoon, Chao said, calling on Ma to explain why Feng went there and what he had done.
Chao was referring to the former ambassador to the Dominican Republic, who now serves on Ma's campaign team as the director of the international affairs section.
"Whether Feng was at the AIT to help Ma fill out Form I-407 or for other formalities [a US green card holder has to] go through to invalidate the card, as an informant had told us, we want Ma to tell the truth," Chao said.
"Could it be that Ma wanted to resolve his green card problem secretly, sending Feng to the AIT on a national holiday instead of a business day?" he asked.
"What the informant told us was what he himself heard from Feng. Before we made any allegations, we determined the context in which the dialogue took place as well as the nature of the relationship between Feng and the informant," he said. "The informant did not overhear this by accident."
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