Poland’s prosecutors have filed an indictment against a former government minister after his email in which he had kept government correspondence was hacked.
Michał Dworczyk, a close ally of former Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, is an MEP for the opposition Conservatives (PiS). He is yet another former minister from the party to face prosecution by the prosecution service controlled by the centre-left government led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk.
Former justice minister Zbigniew Ziobro who has been granted political asylum in Hungary has been charged with abuse of power, and former PM Morawiecki himself is facing charges for allegedly breaking the law over the attempted organisation of a postal ballot in the presidential election of 2020 during the pandemic.
Dworczyk, who served as head of Morawiecki’s chief of staff, was charged over an incident in 2021 that saw sensitive emails of dozens of politicians and government officials published online.
Morawiecki at the time criticized the media for publishing the emails and Dworczyk said that none of the contents of his private email had related to national security matters, only internal politics and non-classified matters relating to the pandemic and economic issues.
The authorities of the time claimed that some of the published material was fake, some was doctored, and some genuine, but refused to comment on the authenticity of individual leaked emails.
On March 11 Dworczyk was charged with using a private email account for official correspondence and of using the unsecure email service for classified information concerning national security and obstructing the investigation by attempting to delete his emails.
Last October, the European Parliament stripped him of the immunity usually enjoyed paving the way for the Polish prosecution.
If found guilty of the charges Dworczyk faces between three months and five years imprisonment.
Dworczyk denies any wrongdoing and believes he is a victim rather than the perpetrator of the crime.
In a post on his X account Dworczyk wrote that he would willingly respond to the indictment as soon as he gets a chance to read it but claimed the prosecution service has repeatedly declined to give him access to the files and that he had learned of his indictment from journalists.
In his statement, Dworczyk denied ordering anyone to delete his emails and said that no evidence of him doing so had been presented.
He went on to state that he was the one who had notified the Internal Security Agency of the hacking of his account and that it was unacceptable that instead of pursuing the perpetrators of the hack, who have yet to be identified, it is the victims who are being pursued.
Dworczyk concluded that he hoped “in an independent court I will demonstrate the absurdity and the political motives of the charges brought against me.”
The Tusk government since coming to power in late 2023 has issued a raft of indictments against former PiS state officials having stood on an election platform of holding former government ministers to account for their time in office.
However, prosecutions which had been instigated by the PiS government’s prosecutors against former Tusk government officials or allies from their time in office (2007-2015) have tended to be abandoned by the prosecution service.
