Jaroslaw Kaczynski's hearing on Friday, March 15 before the parliamentary commission of inquiry was eagerly anticipated. The commission is investigating whether the use of Pegasus spyware to monitor members of the Democratic opposition was legal. The former strongman of the ultraconservative PiS (Law and Justice) majority, in power between 2015 and 2023, was also deputy prime minister in charge of security affairs between 2020 and 2022. He was the first political heavyweight to testify before the commission, which was established on February 19 and is the only one of its kind in Europe.

The information available to date, revealed by the Canadian organization Citizen Lab and corroborated by the Polish media, indicates that the use of Pegasus, a sophisticated smartphone hacking tool, has reached a scale in Poland that is unprecedented in Western democracies.

During almost eight hours of hearings, in a chaotic atmosphere constantly disrupted by the posturing of PiS deputies and that of the principal concerned party, Kaczynski was able to take advantage of the investigating committee's main weakness. At this stage, the commission has been unable to obtain any new or classified information from the Ministries of Justice or Interior Ministry, forcing it to rely on elements described in the press and widely known to the public. "My knowledge does not go beyond what has been reported in the media, and my knowledge of confidential information is marginal," stated Kaczynski.

The PiS president's hearing began an hour late, due to his refusal to take the oath in its entirety. Kaczynski refused to utter the words "tell the whole truth," arguing that he could not reveal confidential information without the prime minister's authorization. This stance was perceived as an attempt to obstruct the hearing. Despite the allowance of closed hearings for such cases, the committee voted to lodge a complaint with the Warsaw court, seeking a financial penalty against the witness. Nevertheless, in the absence of a full oath, doubts persist as to the formal legality of Kaczynski's testimony. Two PiS members of the committee were also excluded from the hearing due to their repeated disruption of the proceedings.

In substance, the hearing did not bring any new elements to public attention, and the PiS line of defense remained unchanged. "The whole Pegasus affair is a political enterprise, media propaganda. It's an imaginary reality," the PiS president declared at the outset. According to a conspiracy theory that he has made his mantra, he sees "indications of the work of the Russian lobby, along with the German lobby, to weaken the Polish state."

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