We thought only Big Labor pulled the strings in Comptroller John Liu’s office — but it turns out an alleged proxy for North Korea has been tugging twine there, too.
As The Post’s Josh Margolin reported earlier this month, Liu quietly hired an unabashed booster of the Stalinist state as his $105,000-a-year policy director.
The apologist at issue is John Choe, who was Liu’s chief of staff during the years Liu sat on the City Council.
Choe quit and mounted a losing bid for Liu’s seat in 2009. Now he runs a group called Nodutdol for Korean Community Development, a pro-communist front that sends people on propaganda trips to the North. South Korea’s consulate general has alleged to Korean-language newspapers that the group is controlled by Pyongyang.
That’s no small matter — the North is hell on earth, where as many as 3.5 million people starved in a mass famine in the mid-1990s, and where hundreds of thousands more rot every day in a sprawling gulag.
It’s a nation where anyone merely suspected of practicing a religion is sent to re-education camps. Where anyone who tries to flee may be executed, their families tortured. Where female prisoners are routinely raped and murdered by guards . …
There are few places on earth as awful — but it’s where Choe spent his honeymoon.
Consider that for a moment, and now consider Liu’s perverse, decade-long friendship with this man, who has spent recent years trying to fight “US imperialism” at home and in Korea.
As Councilman Vincent Ignizio (R-SI) told The Post: “It certainly calls into question for New Yorkers who John Liu is putting his faith in. For the comptroller to hire this guy clandestinely leads me to question his judgment.”
Liu has a right to hire just about anyone he pleases, of course, but it’s frightening that a member of city government backs Kim Jong-il’s terror state. And it’s a shock that Liu, who wants to be mayor, would associate with Choe, let alone hire him.
But then, Liu is nothing if not surprising.