U.S. helped former Polish minister Ziobro get visa to leave Hungary

A senior U.S. official helped former Polish justice minister Zbigniew Ziobro secure a visa that let him leave Hungary and enter the United States, a move that put Washington at the center of a fight over political loyalty, judicial independence and anti-corruption credibility.

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau instructed senior State Department officials to facilitate and approve the visa after being alerted earlier this spring by Tom Rose, the U.S. ambassador to Poland. Landau viewed Ziobro as someone who was being unjustly prosecuted. The visa was issued through the U.S. Embassy in Budapest, and it may have been handled as a journalist visa. Officials were unaware of any direct role by Donald Trump, and it was unclear what role, if any, Secretary of State Marco Rubio played.

The case is fraught because Ziobro is not a routine traveler. Polish prosecutors say he faces 26 charges tied mainly to alleged misuse of money from the Justice Fund, a program created in 2012 to help victims of crime and provide post-penitentiary assistance. Prosecutors and auditors say about 150 million zloty, roughly $35 million to $41 million, was diverted for broader crime-prevention spending and politically useful projects. Poland’s prosecutor general asked parliament to authorize criminal liability and detention, and the Sejm waived Ziobro’s parliamentary immunity on Nov. 7, 2025. A Warsaw court ordered pre-trial detention on Feb. 5, 2026, and prosecutors later sought a European Arrest Warrant, saying he was likely hiding in an EU country.

Ziobro has denied wrongdoing and cast himself as the target of a politically motivated campaign by Poland’s pro-European Union government. His case sits at the heart of a larger struggle over the rule of law in Poland, where he was one of the key architects of judicial reforms pushed under the Law and Justice, or PiS, government from 2015 to 2023. The European Union said those reforms undermined judicial independence.

The diplomatic fallout widened after Ziobro confirmed on May 10 that he was in the United States after traveling from Hungary. Poland’s foreign ministry later sent diplomatic notes to Hungary and separately asked the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw for the legal basis of his entry. Hungary’s former prime minister Viktor Orban had granted Ziobro asylum in January, but the political arithmetic changed after Hungary’s April election and the coming transfer of power. The episode now raises a sharper question for Washington: whether visa discretion was used to help a politically aligned ally, and what that signals to governments the United States urges to police corruption and defend the rule of law.