Things played out pretty much as I wrote in the previous post.
· News article: “Democratic Party self-destructs over the Nagata incident, protest calls flooding in”
The problem of the “wire transfer instruction email” from former Livedoor president Takafumi Horie (33), which critics had called fabricated. Democratic Party MP Yasuyuki Nagata (36), who first raised the email’s existence, suddenly indicated his intention to resign, sending shockwaves through the party on the 23rd.Party leader Maehara and the executive team held repeated discussions in a parliamentary conference room, while the party headquarters was flooded with protest calls. Fellow MPs also appeared unable to hide their frustration.
DPJ parliamentary affairs chairman Yoshihiko Noda had been scheduled to hold a press conference in parliament at 10 a.m., drawing nearly 100 journalists — but Noda only appeared nearly two hours later at around 11:50 a.m. With a stern expression, he confirmed that Nagata had indicated his intention to resign, saying “I heard from him yesterday.” Secretary-General Yukio Hatoyama stated: “We are taking the situation very seriously — we did not have sufficient corroborating evidence that the email was authentic.”
One party MP remarked with apparent frustration: “The focus has been blurred away from whether the email is real or not. The money trail is something you could trace if you looked.”
When Nagata raised the allegation in the House of Representatives Budget Committee on the 16th — that Horie had emailed an instruction to send money to LDP Secretary-General Takebu’s second son — only a small number of senior figures including Maehara and Noda had been briefed in advance. Voices within the party were also beginning to question Maehara’s and others’ accountability.
The DPJ headquarters in Nagatacho had been receiving a constant stream of calls from early that morning — “The DPJ are liars,” “I was so disappointed by the party leader debate on the 22nd” — at a volume comparable to peak election periods.
Former Lower House MP Yazaburo Narasaki (85), known in parliament as a “bomb thrower,” commented that the situation was “deeply regrettable.”
◆ “We should avoid a trend that treats the DPJ as wrong and the LDP as right” ◆
Narasaki recalled that when Nagata was first elected in June 2000, at a celebration Nagata had approached him and said “I too want to drop bombshell questions in parliament.” “I warned him: it’s not that simple. If you don’t verify your sources thoroughly, you’ll be the one destroyed. But…” This time around, Narasaki said: “He should have convinced his source to go public — ‘if necessary, I’ll need you to come forward’ — before making the allegation. This was too amateur. The consequences were foreseeable. The party executive should have guided young Nagata properly.”
Journalist Yoshiko Sakurai commented: “I understand Nagata’s intent, but the DPJ must have known how shaky this email was. Yet Maehara’s decision to press forward aggressively must be called politically immature. That said, this affair was also an indictment of Takebu and others for having campaigned almost officially in support of Horie during the election. The public should not be allowed to conclude from all this that the DPJ was wrong and the LDP was right.”
Anyone who understands email systems knows that emails can be easily spoofed.
Without analyzing the email headers and confirming the sender’s identity with their ISP, you can’t verify authenticity.
That said, ISPs can’t disclose information without a proper request from law enforcement or another authorized body — so verification through that route is difficult too.