After three special counsel probes, the second special counsel examining remaining allegations on Apr. 1 launched raids of the National Information Resources Service and the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport in connection with suspected preferential treatment tied to changes to the Seoul–Yangpyeong Expressway route. Following a travel ban on former Minister of Land, Infrastructure and Transport Won Hee-ryong, investigators began compulsory seizures targeting national computer records, signaling a full-scale expansion of the probe to trace the decision-making path at the time and whether higher-ups were involved.
On the day, the special counsel sent investigators to execute search warrants at the National Information Resources Service in Yuseong District, Daejeon; the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport (MOLIT) in Sejong; and the homes and offices of related figures. Materials to be secured were said to include emails exchanged by MOLIT employees and documents drafted in connection with the Yangpyeong Expressway project. Because the National Information Resources Service stores government work documents and various computer files, the special counsel appears to be seeking to broadly verify internal reports and review traces from the project's promotion process.
The suspicion over the Yangpyeong Expressway route change centers on whether the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport (MOLIT), while pushing the Seoul–Yangpyeong Expressway project in 2023, reviewed an endpoint plan in Gangsang-myeon—where First Lady Kim Keon-hee's family owns land and an ancestral grave—instead of the original endpoint of Yangseo-myeon, conferring preferential treatment. The original plan passed a preliminary feasibility study in 2021, but when the Gangsang-myeon endpoint plan was reviewed in May 2023, controversy erupted, and former Minister Won declared the project scrapped in July of the same year.
Min Joong-ki, the special counsel who investigated allegations related to First Lady Kim Keon-hee, began the probe in July last year by raiding the minister's office at the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport (MOLIT) and the Korea Expressway Corporation (KEC), and carried out additional searches of MOLIT working-level officials in September and October of the same year. However, while indicting a MOLIT deputy director and others, the special counsel ultimately failed to determine whether former Minister Won was involved and handed the case to police.
The second special counsel, which took over the case, imposed a travel ban on former Minister Won last month and on the day moved to secure national computer records. In legal circles, the raids are seen as an effort not merely to obtain working-level materials but to reconstruct what reporting lines and approval processes the route review went through. The focus of the special counsel's investigation also appears to be widening beyond working-level judgments to the entire decision-making line at MOLIT at the time.