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Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and is published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.
Antoni Macierewicz, deputy leader of Poland’s opposition Law and Justice (PiS) party and former defence minister, has been charged by prosecutors with disclosing classified information. If convicted, he could face up to five years in prison.
The accusation pertains to the period when the national-conservative PiS was in office, and Macierewicz served as head of a controversial commission established to re-investigate the causes of the 2010 plane crash in Smolensk that killed President Lech Kaczyński, one of the founders of PiS, and 95 others.
Prokuratorzy przedstawili dziś Antoniemu Macierewiczowi zarzut popełnienia przestępstwa ujawnienia informacji niejawnych, a następnie przesłuchali go w charakterze podejrzanego. 🔽https://t.co/A7yWf02NKH
— Prokuratura (@PK_GOV_PL) September 3, 2025
Last month, the government’s majority in parliament voted to strip Macierewicz, a sitting MP, of his legal immunity so that prosecutors could bring charges against him.
Today, the National Prosecutor’s Office confirmed in a statement that Macierewicz had been charged with “disclosing, as a public official, classified information marked ‘Top Secret’, ‘Secret’, ‘Confidential’ and ‘Restricted'”.
It added that the politician, when interviewed as a suspect, had not admitted to the crimes he was accused of and had refused to provide explanations. Prosecutors have not publicly revealed exactly which classified information Macierewicz is accused of disclosing.
PiS and its leader, Jarosław Kaczyński – Lech’s identical twin brother – have long suggested that Russia was behind the Smolensk crash and that the then Polish government, led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk, was either complicit or subsequently helped to cover it up.
When PiS came to power in 2015, it established a commission within the defence ministry to re-investigate the crash. Maciereiwcz, who was then serving as defence minister, headed up the commission.
However, despite Macierewicz and Kaczyński repeatedly claiming over the following eight years that the commission had obtained, and would soon reveal, proof that the crash was deliberately caused, no conclusive evidence was ever produced by it.
Smolensk was an “attack decided at the highest level of the Kremlin”, says Jarosław Kaczyński ahead of the 12th anniversary of the crash.
Donald Tusk's government then “covered up” the incident as part of a “macabre reconciliation with Russia”, he adds https://t.co/5ae0gHJj3B
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) April 4, 2022
In 2023, a new government – again led by Tusk – replaced PiS in power. It immediately closed down the commission, saying that it had been spreading “lies” about Smolensk.
Last year, a report by the defence ministry into the activities of the commission claimed it had wasted tens of millions of zloty in public funds. As a result, the ministry filed notifications of over 40 suspected crimes, including by Macierewicz and his successor as defence minister in the PiS government, Mariusz Błaszczak.
In July, when filing a request to parliament for Macierewicz’s immunity to be lifted, the then prosecutor general, Adam Bodnar, noted that he was still being investigated over 21 alleged crimes relating to his time heading the commission, including abuse of powers, falsification of documents, and obstructing criminal proceedings.
The defence ministry will notify prosecutors of 41 suspected crimes linked to a commission established by the former PiS government to investigate the 2010 plane crash in Russia that killed President Lech Kaczyński https://t.co/aEAlmk9lDM
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) October 24, 2024
Since Tusk returned to power, the authorities have launched investigations into a variety of alleged crimes committed by members of the former PiS government, leading to a number of them being stripped of immunity.
PiS, however, claims that the cases are being pursued for political reasons, as an act of “revenge” against the former ruling party by the new administration.
Macierewicz himself has strenuously denied any wrongdoing. After his immunity was lifted last month, he declared that what was being done to him was “in some ways even more terrible than what happened during the communist period”, when he was regularly detained as an opponent of the regime.
But today’s news was welcomed by government spokesman Adam Szłapka, who declared that “the time has come to settle accounts for his harmful activities”.
Antoni Macierewicz z zarzutami za ujawnienie tajnych dokumentów. Przychodzi czas rozliczenia jego szkodliwej działalności.
— Adam Szłapka (@adamSzlapka) September 3, 2025
Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.
Main image credit: NATO/Flickr (under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.
