A fugitive former Polish justice minister wanted in his home country on charges of misusing public funds and deploying spyware against political opponents has turned up in the United States, shielded by a visa that Donald Trump reportedly approved personally over the objections of his own Secretary of State and the American ambassador in Warsaw.
Zbigniew Ziobro confirmed his arrival in the US in a Sunday evening interview with TV Republika, the right-wing Polish broadcaster that announced simultaneously it had hired him as its American political commentator — a arrangement that appears to have provided the official basis for his entry. Polish news outlet Onet reported that Ziobro had received a journalist visa linked to the station. TV Republika declined to confirm or deny the report. Gazeta Wyborcza reported that Trump personally approved the visa despite resistance from Marco Rubio and ambassador Tom Rose.
“The United States is freedom,” Ziobro told the network. “Freedom you can actually fight for.”
The journey to American television studios was not straightforward. Ziobro had been living in Hungary since 2025, after former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán granted him asylum — a move that kept Polish extradition requests in suspension for as long as Orbán remained in power. That protection evaporated when Péter Magyar defeated Orbán and took office as Hungary’s new prime minister, having explicitly promised to launch extradition proceedings against Ziobro. The window between Magyar’s victory and the activation of those proceedings appears to be precisely when Ziobro moved, traveling on an asylum-related document issued by Hungary rather than his Polish passport, which Warsaw had revoked.
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Poland wants Ziobro on two categories of serious allegation. The first involves the alleged misuse of public funds during his tenure as justice minister under the Law and Justice government of Jarosław Kaczyński.
The second — and more politically explosive — concerns the deployment of Pegasus spyware against political opponents, journalists and public figures while he held a portfolio that gave him oversight of law enforcement and prosecutorial institutions. The Pegasus allegations have been the subject of parliamentary and judicial investigations in Poland since the Law and Justice government lost power in 2023.
Ziobro has called all charges fabricated and characterized the investigation as a political vendetta orchestrated by Prime Minister Donald Tusk.
In Sunday’s interview, he pointed to a post Tusk made on social media declaring that Ziobro would be arrested while the former minister still had parliamentary immunity — a statement Ziobro described as improper interference in judicial proceedings. “Donald Tusk cannot write that tweet in the United States,” he said, framing the American legal system as the arena in which he intends to fight extradition rather than return to face Polish courts.
Polish Justice Minister Waldemar Żurek said Sunday his ministry would immediately begin extradition proceedings against Ziobro in the United States. The Polish foreign ministry said it had no official information about Ziobro’s whereabouts, a statement that sat awkwardly alongside the fact that his location had just been confirmed on live television.
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The diplomatic implications of Trump’s reported personal intervention in the visa decision are considerable. The United States and Poland are NATO allies with a significant security relationship — Poland hosts American troops, has been among the most consistent European supporters of US policy on Ukraine and Russia, and has cultivated the bilateral relationship as a cornerstone of its national security strategy. Approving a visa for a man wanted by Polish courts, reportedly over the explicit objections of the secretary of state and the Warsaw ambassador, introduces a friction into that relationship that Warsaw will struggle to absorb quietly.
Ziobro’s ideological alignment with Trump’s political worldview is not incidental to any of this. His Law and Justice party occupied the same cultural and political space in Poland that Trump’s MAGA movement occupies in the United States — nationalist, socially conservative, hostile to liberal institutional frameworks, and engaged in sustained conflict with what both movements describe as a politically weaponized judiciary. The framing Ziobro deployed in Sunday’s interview — that he is a political prisoner of a Tusk vendetta seeking freedom in America — maps directly onto the narrative language that resonates with Trump’s base and with Trump himself.
Whether the US courts will ultimately honor a Polish extradition request, and whether the Trump administration will facilitate or obstruct that process, is the question that will define what Ziobro’s American chapter actually means — for him, for Polish-American relations and for the message it sends to other figures in similar circumstances watching from elsewhere in Europe.