Prime Minister Donald Tusk of Poland warned Thursday that he might be forced to call early elections if a scandal over secretly taped conversations of senior government officials continued to escalate.

“If the crisis of confidence becomes too deep, perhaps the only way out will be early elections,” he said in a hastily organized news conference on the morning of a major national holiday, the Catholic feast of Corpus Christi, when government offices are normally dormant.

The news conference came after a tense scene on Wednesday in the offices of Wprost, the weekly newspaper that published transcripts of the conversations last weekend. Polish security officers raided the newspaper’s offices and demanded the personal laptop of the top editor, Sylwester Latkowski, saying it might contain the evidence they need in their investigation of who made the illegal recordings.

The editor refused, called on other Polish journalists for support, and after a standoff that lasted for hours, the security agents left without the laptop.