Tusk calls for probe into Russian role in Polish wiretapping

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Donald Tusk, the head of Poland’s largest opposition party, called Tuesday on the country’s ruling party to fully clarify the facts surrounding an eight-year-old affair involving the illegal recordings of top politicians and coal imports from Russia.

Tusk said it has long been clear that Russia was involved in the affair, but that a parliamentary investigative commission was needed to determine the scale of Russian interference and to what extent any Poles collaborated with Russian intelligence services.

The wiretapping and publication of private conversations of leaders from the world of politics and business created a scandal in 2014 that damaged the standing of Tusk’s pro-European party, Civic Platform, and helped the ruling populist Law and Justice party win power the following year.

Tusk argued at a news conference in Warsaw that the affair cast a shadow over the current right-wing government because of an impression that it came to power with the help of Russian interference.

Addressing ruling party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski, Tusk said: “Mr. Kaczynski, it is in the interest of Poland, of public opinion, but also in the interest of you and your party, that this disturbing ambiguity, this disturbing shadow hanging over your governments should not remain."

“I am calling for the establishment of a parliamentary investigative committee so that no one in Poland can speculate that Law and Justice's power was in fact installed by the Russian services,” Tusk said. “Today such guesses are valid.”

A Polish businessman, Marek Falenta, was convicted and sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison for organizing the illegal recordings in Warsaw restaurants, while two waiters were also convicted.

At the time of the recordings Falenta owed millions of dollars for...