Former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback called on the Trump administration to intervene for Morse H. Tan, his former diplomatic colleague who has been barred from leaving South Korea for months. "I was shocked, I really was," Brownback told The Christian Post about the exit ban against Tan, who served with him in the U.S.
State Department as the U.S. ambassador-at-large for global criminal justice during President Donald Trump's first term. Tan has been prohibited since June from leaving South Korea and is slated to face his first trial hearing in the country Friday for allegedly defaming its president on American soil last year.
He was swept up into the reopened criminal investigation against him when he traveled to South Korea in late May to observe local elections amid allegations of irregularities and Chinese interference. "Here's a former U.S. diplomat, a respected legal scholar and professor who's being arrested and persecuted in a democracy," continued Brownback, the former governor of Kansas who was the U.S. ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom from 2018 to 2021.
"If he were traveling to North Korea or Russia, I wouldn't be surprised at all. But he's not.
It's South Korea, and so I was really stunned when I first heard about it." Tan, whose successive exit bans have reportedly been extended until at least November, was charged without detention in July with criminally defaming South Korean President Lee Jae Myung during a June 2025 event about Korean election integrity at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
A clip went viral on social media at the time of Tan noting at the event that there have been rumors and reports that Lee was involved in "gang-raping and murdering a young lady" when he was a teenager, and that he was consequently unable