Musings of an Old Curmudgeon: Tusk Scrambles to Prevent Nawrocki’s Security Chief from Accessing Classified Documents

08 August 2025

Tusk Scrambles to Prevent Nawrocki’s Security Chief from Accessing Classified Documents

Tusk is obviously afraid that if Nawrocki's Security Chief sees the files it will be revealed that he's a traitor to Poland, working for Brussels.

From The European Conservative

By Tamás Orbán

The liberal PM is accused of “paralyzing” the work of Poland’s National Security Bureau by denying security clearance to its conservative-appointed director.

The office of Polish PM Donald Tusk has filed an appeal to the country’s top administrative court in an effort to overturn a previous ruling and prevent Sławomir Cenckiewicz, the chief security advisor of President Karol Nawrocki, from having his security clearance restored, giving him access to classified documents.

The liberal PM’s office argues that the newly appointed head of the National Security Bureau (BBN) cannot be trusted with top secret docs after Tusk stripped him of his clearance last year and prosecutors charged him with aiding and abetting the disclosure of classified military plans in 2023.

However, the court has since acquitted Cenckiewicz and restored his clearance in June, a decision that the prime minister now desperately wants to have overturned—fueling speculations about what information he could be trying to hide from the conservatives.

The PM’s appeal was filed just one day before Nawrocki’s inauguration, foreshadowing a long line of expected legislative and administrative deadlocks between the two power centers of Polish politics, which continue to remain in opposing hands.

According to the government-aligned Military Counterintelligence Service (SKW), the appeal means that Cenckiewicz’s security clearance is once again automatically suspended until a final ruling is issued, something that the new security chief contested.

“I accept the terms of war!” Cenckiewicz wrote on social media, adding “leave that to the lawyers” to work out whether the suspension applies automatically.

Meanwhile, the president’s office and the conservative opposition PiS condemn the move as another politically motivated attack on them, which aims to “paralyze” Cenckiewicz’s—and, by proxy, Nawrocki’s—work, as the new security chief would not be able to access state secrets or participate in high-level meeting, including within NATO, without a clearance.

“You are denying access to classified information to the future head of the BBN, effectively paralyzing his work,” PiS MP Janusz Cieszyński commented. “Is political revenge really a sufficient reason to hinder cooperation concerning the security of all Poles?”

The whole scandal began in late 2023, when then defense minister Mariusz Błaszczak from the previous PiS government declassified and published secret military plans from 2011, the time of the first Tusk government, which the PiS used to claim that Tusk was ready to abandon half of the country in the event of a hypothetical Russian invasion.

According to the declassified docs, the Tusk government was expecting the total collapse of the defense at the country’s eastern border within two weeks of such an attack, and was preparing to set up a secondary defensive line along the Vistula River to withdraw behind.

After Tusk’s victory in December 2023, prosecutors charged Błaszczak with abuse of power over the incident, but no ruling has been issued in the case yet.

Cenckiewicz, meanwhile, who was serving as the head of the director of the Military Historical Office (WBH) back then, was only charged with aiding Błaszczak in May of this year, which further adds weight to the opposition’s argument about political persecution.

Cenckiewicz has consistently denied having any role in the declassification of the ‘Vistula Files.’