The People First Party (PFP) legislative caucus yesterday demanded that President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) produce solid proof to verify an alleged meeting between the PFP chairman and a top Chinese official, and planned to file for impeachment if he failed to solve what they called "a more serious political scandal than the Watergate case."
Secret meeting
To prove that Chen's allegation made in a recent TV interview -- in which he claimed that PFP Chairman James Soong (
During the meeting, officials from National Security Bureau (NSB), the Bureau of Investigation under the Ministry of Justice, and the Military Intelligence Bureau under the Ministry of National Defense, denied that the Presidential Office or National Security Council (NSC), which is headed by the president, had ordered them to check the allegation.
No information
"The NSC gathers intelligence information from all eight intelligence agencies and presents it to the president every day, and there has been absolutely no information provided about any Soong-Chen meeting," NSB Chief Secretary Lin Cheng-tung (林成東) said at the breakfast meeting.
PFP Legislator Chang Hsien-yao (張顯耀) said that since all the intelligence agencies claimed they had neither supplied any information to the president nor checked the alleged information, the president might be using a piece of "false information" as a political tool to attack Soong.
Later in Keelung, at a campaign event to promote a PFP candidate for the local government elections, Soong once again denied that he had ever met with Chen Yunlin, but said he never intended to sue the president.
Unavoidable
"It is sometimes unavoidable that the president may receive different information, some of it true and some false ... If the president finds out that the information is not true and offers me an apology, I will accept it," he said.
If the president fails to prove the allegation, the caucus said it will not rule out the possibility of exercising the right of the Law Governing Legislators' Exercise of Power (立法院職權行使法) to impeach the president.
The law stipulates that to proceed with an impeachment attempt, a motion must be carried by no less than one-fourth of all legislators.
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