Donald Tusk beforehand advised the Republican might have labored for Moscow, however now claims it by no means occurred
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has backtracked on his earlier declare that US President-elect Donald Trump might have been recruited by Russian spies. A journalist who pressed the Polish chief on the matter claimed she was promptly blacklisted by his workplace, sparking a firestorm within the native media.
The scandal erupted on Thursday when Monika Rutke, a journalist for Tygodnik Solidarnosc and Tysol.pl, requested Tusk to touch upon his earlier assertion that Trump, because the journalist paraphrased, “might have virtually agent-like ties with Moscow,” and whether or not he might think about Poland and the US having good relations attributable to this.
Tusk dodged the query, as an alternative taking a swipe on the opposition and reflecting on potential modifications in US coverage on Ukraine beneath Trump. When Rutke pressed him for a solution, Tusk claimed that he “had by no means made such strategies.”
Nonetheless, this doesn’t seem like the case. In a speech in March 2023, Tusk stated that Trump’s “dependence on Russian companies is past dispute,” claiming that this was “the results of an investigation by the American particular companies,” which he stated “don’t rule out that Trump was truly recruited by the Russian companies 30 years in the past.”
Lots of the allegations about Trump’s ties to Russia got here from a file compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, which got here to mild in 2017. A prolonged investigation by particular counsel Robert Mueller, nevertheless, discovered that whereas some members of the Trump marketing campaign did certainly have contact with Russian officers, there was no proof to counsel a legal conspiracy.
Rutke stated that after she pressed Tusk for a solution, she obtained a message from Agnieszka Rucinska, the undersecretary of state within the chancellery, saying that the journalist was now not welcome on the prime minister’s conferences.
Rucinska has tried to downplay the controversy, claiming that the journalist was solely allowed to ask one query, however “began screaming on the finish of the convention” and accused her of “spreading lies” concerning the incident.
In response, Tygodnik Solidarnosc and Tysol.pl issued a joint assertion denouncing the Polish authorities’s dealing with of the incident. Rutke, they argued, was “doing her job” however was “punished” for trying to make clear the query Tusk did not reply.
“[This] is an absolute scandal and is proof of the deep dysfunction of the present authorities when it comes to understanding the essential guidelines of the democratic world,” the assertion learn.
The retailers added that they had been contemplating authorized motion, together with submitting a grievance with the prosecutor’s workplace, and known as on Tusk to fireplace Rucinska.
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