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The Honorable Ted Cruz
United States Senator for Texas
404 Russell Senate Office Building
United States Senate
Washington, DC 20510
Dear Senator Cruz,
In view of the impending confirmation hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee of the Biden administration nominees for ambassadorial positions, there exist serious questions concerning integrity of one of the nominees.
1. Mr Mark Francis Brzezinski, the Biden administration candidate for the position of United States Ambassador to Poland, holds a current citizenship of Poland, a fact possibly not disclosed by him in the US Government security vetting process.
2. As his Polish citizenship makes it constitutionally impossible for the Polish Government to issue a diplomatic accreditation to Mr Brzezinski as an Ambassador of a foreign power to Poland, the Polish Government has concocted a cover story to enable the appointment of Mr Brzezinski, purporting him to be not a citizen of Poland, but a citizen of the Czech Republic.
3. Mr Brzezinski has history of undeclared lobbying for the Government of Poland, going back to his co-founding in 2002 of the American Polish Advisory Council (APAC), a 510 (c)(4), organization registered in Washington DC, seeking to influence the 2004 George W. Bush vs. John Kerry presidential election. APAC lobbied the candidates in favour of at least one declared and published foreign policy objective of the Republic of Poland, yet was apparently never registered as a foreign agent under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), as required by law.
4. Mr Brzezinski has a personal association with a Mr Radoslaw Sikorski, a fellow co-founder of APAC and husband of a well known American author and political commentator Anne Applebaum, herself a naturalized Polish citizen.
Mr Sikorski is a former (2005-07) Minister of Defense and a former (2007-2014) Minister of Foreign Affairs of Poland.
He was dismissed from his Ministerial position and sidelined by his own political party in 2014 as a result of coming to light of his crude, highly contemptuous and disparaging remarks on the US-Polish military and political alliance.
Yours sincerely,
Stary Wiarus
NOTES:
Ad 1. Mr Mark Brzezinski is a son of the late American diplomat and political scholar Zbigniew Brzezinski (1928–2017), former National Security Adviser to the Carter administration. Zbigniew Brzezinski was a citizen of Poland by birth, and became a naturalized United States citizen on December 22, 1958. However, he had never resigned, renounced or lost his Polish citizenship.
Consequently, by virtue of the Polish citizenship law, Mark Brzezinski automatically became a Polish citizen at birth, by descent from his father, Zbigniew Brzezinski. Like his father, Mark Brzezinski had never resigned, renounced or lost his Polish citizenship. It is not clear whether he has ever disclosed this citizenship in background investigations preceding issue of his security clearances.
Ad 2. Upon discovery that Mr Brzezinski's Polish citizenship presented an insurmountable legal and constitutional bar* to his appointment as an Ambassador of a foreign power to Poland, the Polish Government has concocted and publicized a cover story in order to salvage the appointment.
The cover story holds that Mark Brzeziński is not a dual US-Polish citizen, but a dual US-Czech citizen. This is purportedly by virtue of his mother holding citizenship of the then Czechoslovakia at the time of Mark's birth (April 7, 1965).
The story is exposed as false upon checking of public records. Mark Brzezinski's mother, Emilie Anna Benes Brzezinski, born Emilie Anna Benes in 1932 in Geneva, Switzerland, daughter of Bohus Antonin Benes (1901–1977) and Emilie Berta Benes née Zadna (1905 – ?), became a naturalized American citizen on February 28, 1955, so she had been a citizen of the United States for over 10 years prior to Mark Brzezinski's birth.
As a result of the Treaty between the United States of America and Czechoslovakia, signed at Prague, July 16, 1928, Treaty Series No. 804, which remained in force from November 14, 1929 to August 20, 1997, Czechoslovak citizens lost their Czechoslovak citizenship upon naturalization in the United States. Therefore, Emilie Benes Brzezinski had been a solely American citizen for over ten years prior to Mark Brzezinski's birth, her Czechoslovak birth citizenship lost and extinct.
* Polish citizenship law mandates treatment of dual citizens on Polish territory as solely Polish citizens. The Constitution of Poland makes it effectively impossible to grant diplomatic immunity from Polish law to a Polish citizen on Polish territory.
Ad.3 The American Polish Advisory Council (APAC), of which Mark Brzezinski was a founding member, included in its program document, Polish American Agenda 2004, a demand for major modification of the American visa and immigration law pursuant to the resolution of the Polish Parliament of June 12, 2003 – an officially declared and published foreign policy objective of the Government of Poland.
Representing political interests of a foreign power requires registration as a foreign agent under the US Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), which APAC apparently did not have nor seek.
