Deeply

The leaked recordings proved deeply embarrassing for Tusk’s government and strained ties with the US They included the foreign minister complaining that Poland’s alliance with the United States “wasn’t worth anything.”

The minister, Radek Sikorski, resigned along with three others four months before the 2015 election.

Sikorski noted Sunday that, back in 2014, there were no US troops yet in Poland as there are now and said “I doubted the efficacy of the alliance.” But he says the transcript was manipulated by the magazine Wprost to suggest he called the alliance “bullshit” - when he only used that word to describe limited US participation in a single NATO exercise.

Now a European Parliament member, Sikorski criticizes American officials for not taking Waitergate as a warning.

“We were a laboratory for what happened in the United States, and the US was too arrogant to take heed,” said Sikorski, who says Russian hacking group Fancy Bear sent him one of the emails that would compromise Democrat Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2016. “We saw it coming. It was successfully tested in Poland.”

Under the conservative Law and Justice government that came to power in 2015, Russian coal imports have doubled. Signs of democratic backsliding, such as government encroaching on the independence of Poland’s judicial system, have caused tensions with the EU. Warsaw has almost ceased to be an advocate for Ukraine.

Central to Rzeczkowski’s theory is the former manager of Sowa & Przyjaciele, who waited on officials in the VIP room. Referred to only as Lukasz N. because of Poland’s privacy law, he previously managed another Warsaw restaurant, Lemongrass, across the street from the US Embassy.