Final Word from Wednesday, November 28, 2018

When Miloš Zeman needed an excuse to appoint Andrej Babiš to the Sobotka cabinet in late 2013, despite Babiš's lack of a clean lustration report, he told Týden that he is skeptical of the lustration law. If Babiš's alleged collaboration with the StB were an ongoing issue, he said, it wouldn't have waited until just before the elections to come to light. In addition, he said, Alojz Lorenc had 15,000 active files of the big fish shredded in the revolutionary chaos. Now we're only talking about the small fry, he said. Babiš used a similar shredding argument last week when defending his refusal to resign. (Or was he perhaps suggesting that some of his opponents were themselves big fish?) This all came at a time when Foreign Min. Tomáš Petříček was sending people to Moscow to negotiate a reduction in the number of Russian diplomats and cars in Prague. Why should Petříček set his sights so low? Why not go for broke and ask Moscow to hand over copies of the shredded files? [ Czech Republic vetting ]