Pia Kjaersgaard, the former head of Dansk Folkeparti, said that she had suspicions last February that domestic intelligence agency PET and Morten Bødskov (S), the justice minister, looked into her personal calendar in order to prevent her from accompanying parliament’s legal committee on a trip to Christiania.
Kjærsgaard’s presence in Christiania would have been a costly affair for PET, which had just been handed its own budget, so the now former PET boss, Jakob Scharf, allegedly ordered employees to access Kjaersgaard’s calendar so that the trip could be organised on a day when Kjærsgaard would not be able to attend.
Kjaersgaard said that her suspicions caused her – for what she called “the first and only time” in the decade that she has been under PET protection – to hide information about a June 2012 trip she planned to make to the freetown.
“I didn’t want them to have the chance to try to pull the wool over my eyes and again cancel the visit on foolish grounds,” Kjaersgaard told Berlingske.
READ MORE: Bødskov says he helped cancel Kjærsgaard’s Christiania visit
"Thin and ridiculous reasons" for cancellation
Assertions that the February trip was cancelled because the then chief of police in Copenhagen, Johan Reimann, was unable to attend a pre-trip meeting and that Bødskov didn’t have enough time to review plans for the trip are laughable, according to Kjaersgaard.
“When they cancelled the first visit, they came up with these thin and ridiculous reasons,” she said. “I thought, ‘What’s going on here?’”
Kjærsgaard said that she had no doubt that she was the reason that the trip was cancelled and that someone had been snooping in her calendar, so she conspired with fellow DF MP Peter Skaarup and others to hide her plans to go to Christiania in June.
“They had the information in good time to make practical and security arrangements, but late enough that it would look strange if they tried to cancel again,” she told Berlingske.
She said that the deception was the first and only time that she hid information from PET.
“It was extremely unpleasant for me, but I was sure that they had used information that I had shared in good faith before to prevent me from attending the earlier trip,” she said. “I believe that the justice minister wanted to stop me from visiting Christiania to prevent from me bringing focus on things like the rampant drug trade there.”
READ MORE: Did justice minister know about plans to spy on Kjærsgaard?
What did Bødskov know?
Kjærsgaard’s calendar has been a major issue for the past few weeks. After initially denying spying on the DF icon, Scharf was forced to step down from his post as head of PET after confirming that he had asked employees to examine Kjærsgaard's calendar to find days that she would not be able to accompany the legal committee on its trip to Christiania.
Leaders from all sides of the political spectrum are now asking what Bødskov knew about the prying into Kjærsgaard’s calendar.
Bødskov, who is scheduled to state his case in front of parliament’s legal committee tomorrow, went on the offensive in an editorial in Politiken newspaper over the weekend, denying that he knew what PET intended to do with the information it gleaned from Kjærsgaard’s calendar and saying that he never claimed that her appearance in Christiania created a higher threat level.
“It is an extremely serious accusation against me and against [PET] that we invented a threat that did not exist,” Bødskov wrote.
Bødskov said that Kjærsgaard’s criticism stems from her bitterness at no longer being able to dictate the agenda for legal and immigration policy.
Kjærsgaard said that the justice minister is running scared.
“To write an opinion piece before he appears in front of the committee on Tuesday – it sounds to me like the minister knows he is in trouble," she told Politiken.
