Poland’s prime minister said the country will review newly released Jeffrey Epstein records from the U.S. Justice Department after the release drew references that could include possible abuse victims in Poland. Speaking after a government meeting in Warsaw on Tuesday, Donald Tusk said the existence of potential Polish victims means Polish authorities have to examine the material for leads that could point to crimes, rather than treating the documents as a distant U.S. story.
Tusk said his government will analyze more than 3 million pages of documents, videos and photos that the U.S. Justice Department released last week. He said Poland would investigate the material in an effort to determine whether there are cases involving abuse of Polish children connected to Epstein, a financier who died in 2019 while awaiting trial in the United States on charges that he sexually abused underage girls at his homes.
Tusk said a team will be set up to analyze the documents, under the leadership of the minister of justice and the minister in charge of secret services. He added that if the team finds information that warrants it, Poland would initiate a formal investigation and request further documents from the United States.
The prime minister said there are already references to possible victims in the files, including information about individuals in Krakow in southern Poland. Tusk said those individuals told Epstein they had a group of “women or girls” for him, and he said there are “more such leads.”
Tusk also said he wanted the investigation to cover whether Epstein had any links to Russian secret services. He did not lay out specific evidence for that concern when he spoke.
Tusk said “so far there are over 1,000 documents among those published which directly concern Vladimir Putin,” without describing the specific content of those documents. He also noted that Putin’s name appears in the released Justice Department records about 1,000 times, but that many of those references are news articles or summaries of news stories shared by others rather than materials tied to any Epstein case itself. Tusk said mentions of Putin also appear occasionally in Epstein’s personal email correspondence, most commonly in discussions about how Putin’s policies might affect world finance.
While Poland moves to review the files, other European governments have announced their own inquiries. On Tuesday, Latvia and Lithuania both said they were opening investigations into the Epstein documents.
In Warsaw, officials did not immediately receive comment from the Russian embassy or the Russian foreign ministry when they were asked about the matter.
The U.S. Justice Department’s release of Epstein-related materials follows years of legal scrutiny and public debate in the United States. U.S. authorities have said they never charged Epstein with running a broader trafficking network and have said they were unable to find sufficient evidence to justify bringing a criminal case against anyone else connected to the case.
The AP report said Jeffrey Epstein’s confidante, Ghislaine Maxwell, was convicted of recruiting girls for Epstein to abuse. The new Polish review places emphasis on whether the released records point to victims in Poland as the documents are examined for possible follow-on steps.