Polish justice minister seeks to strip opposition MP of immunity for deleting emails sought by prosecutors

Prosecutor general Adam Bodnar, who also serves as justice minister, has asked parliament to strip an opposition MP of immunity so that he can face charges for allegedly obstructing an investigation by ordering the deletion of emails from his inbox.

The request comes just two days before the politician in question, Michał Dworczyk, stands as a candidate for the Law and Justice (PiS) party in the European elections. Dworczyk claims Bodnar’s actions are a “clumsy attempt” to distract attention from the government’s failings.

Between 2017 and 2023, Dworczyk served as chief of staff to PiS Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki. In 2021, his private email account was hacked and many of the messages were then leaked online, including some containing classified material. That prompted prosecutors to launch an investigation.

Today, Bodnar – who is part of the ruling coalition that replaced PiS in government in December – asked the speaker of the Sejm, the lower house of the parliament, for the chamber’s consent to “hold Michał Dworczyk criminally liable…[for] the crime of obstructing criminal proceedings”.

“The obstruction allegedly consisted of granting access to a private email box used by him to designated individuals and ordering them to permanently delete emails sent from the inbox within indicated time frames,” said the prosecutor general’s office in statement.

This was discovered when prosecutors had sought to secure the emails as evidence but “it was determined [that] the contents of the inbox were partially deleted in a way that made it impossible to recover deleted messages”.

“The result of this action was the destruction of data constituting important evidence for determining the circumstances of the hacker attack, which is the subject of the proceedings,” they added.

Dworczyk, who is currently running as a PiS candidate in Sunday’s European elections, commented on the request to strip him of immunity yesterday, even before it was formally submitted today.

He suggested that it was no coincidence that, despite investigations into the hacking of his inbox taking place for almost three years, a request for lifting his immunity has come just before he stands in elections.

Dworczyk also noted that, while he has “victim status in this investigation…I learn today from the media that I am not a victim but supposedly a suspect”.

“I see this as a clumsy attempt to cover up the dramatic events and embarrassing problems of those currently in power,” he declared. “The truth will always defend itself in the end.”

Members of the Sejm enjoy immunity from criminal prosecution unless a majority of the chamber votes for them to be stopped from that privilege. The ruling coalition holds a majority in the Sejm and the speaker of the chamber, Szymon Hołownia, is one of the leaders of that coalition.

Last month, Bodnar also submitted a request for another opposition politician, Michał Woś, who belongs to a party allied with PiS, to be stripped of immunity to face charges over his role in the purchase of Pegasus spyware when he was part of the former PiS government.

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Main image credit: Adam Guz/KPRM (under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 PL)

Alicja Ptak

Alicja Ptak is senior editor at Notes from Poland and a multimedia journalist. She previously worked for Reuters.