J.D. Vance, the Republican senator from Ohio, has been named by Donald Trump as the candidate for Vice President of the United States. Over recent months, Vance has taken a keen interest in the unlawful actions of Donald Tusk’s government in Poland, leading to his intervention. In January 2024, we published an article about a letter the Republican sent to the U.S. Secretary of State, Antony Blinken. Today, we revisit that letter.
“I am writing to express concern about actions recently taken by Poland’s new government against influential Polish public broadcasters. The firings of personnel at Telewizja Polska (TVP), Polskie Radio, and the Polish Press Agency, initiated promptly after Prime Minister Donald Tusk and his political allies took power, raise questions about this new government’s commitment to media freedom and the rule of law,” reads the letter.
In his letter, Senator Vance highlighted how the illegal media takeover was perceived by Polish President Andrzej Duda and the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights.
“Biden administration officials, at least publicly, have said nothing,” noted JD Vance. He drew a parallel to Donald Trump’s dismissal of the head of the United States Agency of Global Media and “government-funded broadcasting chiefs,” which elicited a clear reaction from the Democrats at the time. Vance expressed his confusion, stating that it is not clear to him “why concerns of this nature are not reflected in the Biden administration’s posture towards the new Polish government.”
“It is not immediately obvious how the Biden administration’s silence on the situation in Poland can be reconciled with past administration rhetoric regarding press freedom in Central Europe. Indeed, in recent years, administration officials have appeared eager to comment on the state of media in neighboring countries, particularly Hungary after its citizens elected a conservative government,” Vance wrote.
He referred to Blinken’s position on the media situation in Hungary and noted that similar positions were formulated by the European Union towards Hungary and the right-wing Polish government when Donald Tusk was a senior official there.
Poland and the USA have traditionally shared close bilateral relations, strengthened by our mutual appreciation for freedom and democracy. Poland is an important ally and one of the few NATO countries that allocates 2 percent of its budget to defense. I urge the encouragement of the new Polish government to reconsider any actions that could undermine this, as well as the freedoms cherished by both Poles and Americans,” the conservative senator from Ohio concluded in his letter.