Giertych will report the matter of monitoring him to the Italian prosecution service
They were most probably afraid of the recording of Jarosław Kaczyński and Gerald Birgfellner as the latter handed Jarosław Kaczyński 50,000 zlotys in an envelope – this is what Roman Giertych says in a special recording about the reasons for using the Pegasus program against him. “From what experts at the University of Toronto told me, this was the most aggressive use of Pegasus they had observed,” he said.
Published at tokfm.pl December 21, 2021
As Associated Press reported on Monday, the Citizen Lab group at the University of Toronto confirmed that attorney-at-law Roman Giertych and Prosecutor Ewa Wrzosek were being monitored with the use of the Israeli Pegasus software.
“From what the experts at the University of Toronto told me, this was the most aggressive use of Pegasus they had observed,” commented Roman Giertych in a special video recording. The monitoring took place in 2019, which was during the campaign and parliamentary elections. “The PiS government wanted to know what I was doing day after day, hour after hour,” emphasised the lawyer and former education minister in Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s government.
He assessed that this is “an obvious crime, a breach of the attorney–client privilege, defence secrecy and human rights”. “The second thing is that it portrays the current Polish government as a country like Egypt or Syria, where the rulers do not care about any rights of the democratic opposition. They just use military programmes – Pegasus is a military programme used as a weapon in Israel – to fight for holding on to power,” Giertych said.
He assessed that the decision to use Pegasus was probably made out of the concern that he would reveal recordings regarding the scandal with the construction of the two towers that were to stand on ulica Srebrna. “They were probably concerned about the recording with Jarosław Kaczyński and Gerald Birgfellner, how the latter handed Jarosław Kaczyński 50,000 zlotys in an envelope,” the lawyer explained.
According to Giertych, it could also be about recordings regarding the Podkarpacie scandal, which he came across while “representing the family of the deceased Dawid Kostecki, who allegedly hanged himself while in custody in Białołęka, in very mysterious circumstances.”
“Messrs Ziobro and Święczkowski were caught. I don’t know what you were looking for in my phone, but I know that you shouldn’t have got yourselves caught. Because now the whole world will see you as common thugs. Because you are thugs. If someone illegally listens in on a lawyer and his conversations with his clients, he is worse than a thug, he is an ordinary barbarian,” said Roman Giertych.
In his speech, the lawyer announced that he would report the suspicion of a crime having been committed by the head of the security services Mariusz Kaminski, PiS chairman, Jarosław Kaczyński, justice minister Zbigniew Ziobro, national prosecutor Bogdan Świeczkowski and other people who, in his opinion, “participated in this”. Why the Italian prosecution service? Because two attacks were made on Giertych’s phone in Italy.
“You are a demoralised bunch of criminals,” the lawyer said about the Law and Justice party politicians.