Roman Giertych: The art of misinformation

A huge scandal is slowly bulging at the top of the US government. The leader of the American “good change”, President Trump, is facing trouble after his son admitted to meeting a Russian lawyer who had promised discrediting information about Hillary Clinton, Trump’s rival in the presidential election. As established by the media, the meeting took place just moments before Donald Trump, aired information about Clinton’s embarrassing e-mails and a few days before publication of her e-mails snatched by hackers. There is a single conclusion to this:

If Trump liaised with Vladimir Putin against Clinton, he may face severe judgment from the American people. This also means that the Kremlin has means to put pressure on President Trump. As an attorney of Radek Sikorski and Jacek Rostowski, Poland’s former foreign minister and finance minister respectively, I have for years been dealing with our eavesdropping affair.

I sat in many court hearings and have become familiar with a mountain of evidence gathered by prosecutors and by the court. In the light of that evidence, it is clear to me that the case of Russia helping Trump is quite similar to the Polish eavesdropping scandal. Unfortunately, I cannot tell everything about the evidence because the prosecution refuses to declassify it. What I can tell you is this:

A group of waiters had been working for Polish secret services for years, recording people in many restaurants of Warsaw. The purpose of this activity, most likely cooked up by the closest entourage of Mariusz Kaminski, is to eavesdrop on businessmen so as to combat corruption. Some members of this group contacted Marek F. (or he contacted them) and went on to recording politicians and those related to the governing party (there is not a single recording of conversations of anyone related to PiS although politicians of the both sides eat in the same restaurants; for instance, why Andrzej Seremet, the Prosecutor General appointed by President Lech Kaczynski has never been recorded?). These activities were not officially signed off by the Central Anti-corruption Bureau (CAB), but agents knew about them. Agents interacting with Marek F. included collaborators of Mariusz Kaminski, together with Ernest Bozek, a high-ranking officer of the CAB from Wroclaw. These contacts had survived the dismissal of Mariusz Kaminski as the head of the CAB. Their nature is held secret so much that the information is being withheld even from the new head of the CAB. Since he was expelled from the CBA, Bozek has been working as an expert in the commission for special services on recommendation from … PiS.

At the same time, Marek F. is conducting big business operations with the Russians. According to reliable media, he owes the Russians US$ 26 million on his trades. Kuzbasskaya Toplivnaya Company, closely related to Putin, is the creditor. The Russians demanded Marek F. to repay his debt at the beginning of June 2014. On June 13, 2014, the “Wprost” weekly published the first recording made on instruction from Marek F. The editor in chief of the weekly, Sylwester Latkowski, was convicted for extortion committed with the involvement of former security agents of the Prime Minister of USSR, A. Gromyko, and fled to Russia from Polish prosecutors. (A few days ago he withdrew his litigation against me for disclosing this fact.) And Piotr Nisztor, the current journalist for “Gazeta Polska”, an intimate associate of people from Mariusz Kaminski’s environment, was the person who closely worked with Marek F.

“Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” revealed that, since 2012, the Vice Minister of Defense, Bartosz Kownacki, had close relations to people accused by the Home Security Agency of spying for Russia. We are also waiting for a serious response to what a Tomasz Piatek wrote in his book about Antoni Macierewicz’s relations with individuals working closely with Russian special services. So far, the Ministry of Defense has not made any comment.

Based on these facts, is it hard to image a scenario very similar to what happened in America? My suspicions are founded on the general rule: the beneficiary is the culprit. The ones who gained on the eavesdropping scandal were only PiS and, internationally, Russia who put a spanner in the works between Poland and the EU. Further, as an attorney, I have never seen such a criminal case as the one of Marek F. There are no obvious motives for the act for which he was condemned in the first instance to 2.5 years in prison. Nor, havent seen a criminal case where the prosecution do so much to protect the criminal from going to jail (they even asked for a suspended sentence). The same applies to the journalists of “Wprost.” The court hearing for illegal publication of the recordings continues after the overruling of the suspended sentence by the court. The prosecution, who first discharged the offense as … a minor one (yes!), delays the proceedings after the overruling of the decision by the court (I made a complaint on behalf of Sikorski and Rostowski) to protect the perpetrators from otherwise imminent judgment. The holdup is the only way to protect these journalists because even a second discharge of the offense will lead to the bringing of a subsidiary indictment by me on behalf of the wronged. And, finally, I have never heard about so huge a debtor to a Russian company who would live so undisturbed as Marek F.

Based on all these circumstances, let me propose a thesis. It is highly probable that the eavesdropping scandal was the first Russian operation in the West, where they used a combination of espionage, economic and political methods to push political events in a direction desired by the Kremlin. And the fact that this direction consists of having an allegedly anti-Russian party take power in Poland is irrelevant. The Republican right in the USA have also been most anti-Russian. This is the ancient art of maskirovka, of which Soviets were the masters.

 

 

Roman Giertych