As Petr Bystron, a member of the European Parliament from Alternative for Germany, a party on the German Right, met with members of Congress in Washington, D.C., German authorities raided two locations previously associated with him, seeking evidence of bribery in what Bystron claims is a politically motivated witch hunt.
“While I was in the Congress I received information that there was one more, there were two raids,” Bystron told The Daily Signal in a phone call Tuesday. The Daily Signal confirmed that Bystron met with Rep. Keith Self, R-Texas, among others.
The raids took place Tuesday in Munich, Bystron said. Authorities raided the home of Bystron’s former employee and a flat Bystron’s former shoe company used to store shoes. These raids represented the 22nd and 23rd raids against locations associated with Bystron, he said.
Bystron claims the underlying reason for the raids—suspicion of Russian bribery—is based on news reporting with no evidence. The new outlet that first reported the story stood by its coverage in comments to The Daily Signal, and the Czech Security Information Service, which the outlet cited as its original source, emphasized Russian influence in its comment on the investigation.
“It’s completely useless to make a searching in a warehouse with shoes,” Bystron said. “It’s obvious that there is nothing. It was just, I think, ‘We are going to raid you when you are in the U.S.,’ because they know what I’m doing here, and this is the fight against them.”
He claims the raids represent an attempt to silence critics of Western involvement in the Ukraine war, opponents of unfettered immigration, and conservatives who oppose the globalist agenda.
“So, this is just terror, and I think this is spitting in the face of JD Vance,” he added, referring to the American vice president.
In a February speech in Munich, Vance condemned what he described as attacks on free speech in Europe.
“To many of us on the other side of the Atlantic, it looks more and more like old, entrenched interests hiding behind ugly Soviet-era words like ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation,’ who simply don’t like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion,” the American vice president said.
The document authorizing the raid cited “suspicion of bribery of elected officials.” Authorities sought documents from January 2020 “regarding communication of the accused Bystron with responsible persons of the internet platform ‘Voice of Europe,'” along with “monetary payments to the accused” related to “his voting behavior and speeches in the German Bundestag [Parliament].”
Bystron faced allegations that he received €20,000 (about $23,500 USD) from people with links to Russian President Vladimir Putin in order to spread Kremlin propaganda, Politico reported. Bystron has vehemently denied the accusations, and he told The Daily Signal that he has yet to face any official charges related to the bribery claims.
When The Daily Signal reached out to the Munich prosecutor’s office for comment, the office sent a lengthy statement about an apparently unrelated case.
Berlin police had filed criminal charges against Bystron in July 2022, accusing him of spreading propaganda for terrorist reasons. He shared a photo montage of several German politicians that, prosecutors say, was meant to give the impression that the politicians were giving a Nazi salute. The Munich prosecutor’s office took over the case in March 2023. While Bystron enjoys immunity as a member of the European Parliament, the European Parliament stripped his immunity in April, and the court has set a hearing for Oct. 17.
Bystron said that case had nothing to do with the bribery investigation.
Bystron also cited as evidence of politically-motivated prosecution a previous charge that he had given a Hitler salute during a speech, a crime under German law. A judge rejected the claim against him in that case.
Before the raids this week, authorities raided 21 locations associated with Bystron, his family, and his associates, he said. The locations included his home, his office in the Bundestag, houses his family owns, and more.
Bystron vehemently denied ever receiving money through Voice of Europe, though the outlet did interview him twice.
“I never got any money for any interview,” he told The Daily Signal.
The claim traces back to an April 3, 2024, story in Denik N, a Czech news outlet that collaborated with Der Spiegel, a German news outlet, on the story.
The Denik N article cites five anonymous sources inside the Czech Parliament who said the Czech Security Information Service claimed to have an audio recording of Bystron counting cash he purportedly received in connection to Voice of Europe.
“We firmly stand by our reporting on the Voice of Europe case,” Pavel Tomášek, editor-in-chief at Denik N, told The Daily Signal in a statement Wednesday. “Mr. Bystron, as a public figure, must accept public interest in his person and actions, including critical scrutiny.”
“We also fully stand behind the investigative work of our colleague Zdislava Pokorná,” Tomášek added, referring to the journalist who reported the story. “Through her reporting, she has exposed numerous wrongdoings in public and political life, for which she received the Journalism Award for journalists under the age of 33.” That award, which Pokorná received earlier this year long after the original reporting on the Voice of Europe story, comes from the Nadace Open Society Fund in Prague, which was formerly a member of the Open Society Foundations founded by Hungarian American billionaire George Soros.
Tomášek “categorically” rejected any “suspicion that our interest in him is in any way related to his support for President Trump.”
Ladislav Šticha, a spokesman for the Czech Security Information Service, said he cannot comment on the Voice of Europe case, but he can “confirm that VoE was a platform through which the European Parliament elections were to be influenced.” He also stated that the agency “has proven that there was influence from the Russian Federation in the VoE case.”
Bystron compared the campaign against him to the Russia collusion narrative against President Donald Trump.
“It is the same campaign,” Bystron told The Daily Signal. “You label everybody who is saying the truth, who is questioning all the globalist s—, and you label him as an agent of Putin or Moscow, and this is exactly what happened.”
“The Russian collusion on Trump, it’s the same,” he added. “They are blackmailing us with the same labels everywhere, and it has nothing to do with reality.”
Bystron served as the AfD speaker on the Foreign Policy Committee in Parliament.
“When I led the committee, we did in one year, we did 16 contacts with Americans,” meeting them in the U.S. or Germany, he recalled. Committee members had a grand total of “one” contact with Russians in that year.
“You could say, ‘Bystron is a fan of Donald Trump or a fan of America,’” he explained. “They said, ‘He was a fan of Putin.’ Why should I be a friend of Putin? I escaped the country which is occupied by Russians.”
Bystron fled what was then Czechoslovakia in 1987, escaping a communist state in the orbit of the U.S.S.R.
He said his opposition to German involvement in the Ukraine war has nothing to do with Putin and everything to do with the German people’s reticence to support it.
“Nobody wants to go to this war,” he told The Daily Signal. “Not the Russian guys, not the Ukrainians. None of the German workers wants to pay for it. It’s simple like that. I’m saying that not because Putin is paying me to say it but because it is true.”
Elon Musk, then head of the Department of Government Efficiency, praised AfD for championing German values against multiculturalism, and urged Germany to “move beyond” its focus on “past guilt” that demonizes German conservatives as a modern incarnation of the Nazi party.
Vance’s office declined to comment for this story. The Open Society Foundations did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment.