Media “falling into Putin’s trap” in reporting hacked emails, warns Polish PM following latest leak

Poland’s prime minister has criticised parts of the media for “falling into Putin’s trap” in their reporting of hacked emails allegedly from the inbox of his chief of staff. The latest leak purports to show that the government discussed cases being considered by the constitutional court with its chief justice, who is supposed to be independent.

“The Belarusian and Russian security services are behind these provocations,” warned Mateusz Morawiecki yesterday. They are seeking to “divide Poles” because “a quarrelling political class is obviously easier to attack – to manage, one might say, from outside – because this is what the Kremlin dreams of.”

His remarks follow the latest in a long series of leaks purporting to be from the private email account of Michał Dworczyk, the prime minister’s chief of staff, who was hacked last year in what Poland said was an action linked to Russia.

The leaks have often contained material embarrassing for the government, but the authorities have said that some of the documents are manipulated and falsified. They have adopted a policy of refusing to comment on the authenticity of individual emails, but some have been confirmed as genuine by people featured in them.

The newly published email, which appeared on Monday, purports to show Dworczyk reporting to Morawiecki that he has held conversations with “Julia P.” to discuss the potential costs to the state that would result from three cases. A response purportedly from the prime minister thanks him for the information.

“Julia P.” is understood to be Julia Przyłębska, the chief justice of the Constitutional Tribunal (TK), Poland’s highest court, and the three cases Dworczyk mentioned are ones that were being considered by the TK at the time the email was supposedly sent in January 2019.

Przyłębska is a close associate of Jarosław Kaczyński, chairman of the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party, and under her leadership the TK has come to be seen by many as a tool of the ruling party – something PiS and Przyłębska deny.

Opposition figures seized on the latest leaked emails as further evidence that the government is coordinating with the tribunal and influencing its decisions. The TK is supposed to be independent of the executive and legislative branches.

MPs from Civic Coalition (KO), the largest opposition group, announced that they would submit a notification to prosecutors alleging that Przyłębska and Dworczyk had abused their powers in violation of the law.

The government’s spokesman, Piotr Müller, however, said that all contact with the TK is publicly documented – thereby suggesting that the email is fake. Likewise, Przyłębska herself told state broadcaster TVP that she “does not consult nor agree on rulings with anyone” other than her fellow TK judges.

A deputy prime minister, Henryk Kowalczyk, took a slightly different line, telling Wirtualna Polska that it is “normal” for the prime minister’s office to want to “find out the financial or budgetary consequences of the [Constitutional] Tribunal’s decisions” so that “the government can know if it has to prepare”.

That argument was rejected by Przyłębska’s predecessor as chief justice, Andrzej Rzepliński, who told Radio Zet that such things “would not happen if we were a democratic country”. PiS “keeps the TK on a short leash. It is a dummy [court]”, said Rzepliński, who is a critic of the government.

In her response to the controversy, Przyłębska claimed that the leak was the responsibility of “Russian provocateurs who are trying to destabilise the situation in Poland”. The prime minister took up that narrative yesterday.

He claimed that, amid the war in Ukraine, there would be further attempts by “the Russian services to entangle us in all sorts of intrigues” and he accused journalists seeking to question him on the leak of “building on Russian provocations”. But Morawiecki said that he refused “to get caught up in this kind of intrigue”.

Those accusations were rejected by Borys Budka, head of KO’s parliamentary caucus. “A minor correction: what is happening is not Putin’s provocation, but Putin’s standards,” he tweeted, suggesting that the actions of the government and TK follow the standards seen in Russia.

Main image credit: Krystian Maj/KPRM (under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Daniel Tilles

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.