Trump-admiring fake Twitter profile delivers perfect case for Sovereignty Protection Authority

The perfect case for the newly established Sovereignty Protection Authority, which began operating on 1 February has been found. During the past few weeks, the government-affiliated press in Hungary has been announcing in unison that there is now definite proof that George Soros funded the Hungarian opposition during the 2022 election campaign, i.e. "the rolling dollars" (the term had become a favourite among government politicians and the government-friendly press alike -TN) came from him. "The leadership of Action for Democracy (A4D) has admitted that Soros gave millions of dollars to the Hungarian left," Mandiner wrote on 2 February. The article, intended as an exposé, was picked up by the entire government-affiliated press and its subject has been kept on the agenda ever since.

All their articles are referencing videos published on an X (formerly Twitter) account dedicated to praising Donald Trump under the name MagaBabe. The videos feature author Kati Marton, chair of A4D's New York advisory board, and Dávid Korányi, the former advisor to Budapest mayor Gergely Karácsony. According to the government’s propaganda outlets the videos show them admitting that Soros is in fact behind them and is their biggest supporter.

This is not the first time that the funding of opposition parties has been linked to the American organisation Action for Democracy. According to a secret service report published in November 2022, Péter Márki-Zay's NGO, Mindenki Magyarországa Mozgalom (The Movement for Everybody's Hungary) received more than HUF 1.8 billion in funding from the organisation headed by Korányi prior to the elections that year. The Hungarian State Audit Office (ÁSZ) recently imposed fines totalling HUF 520 million on opposition parties on account of them having received funding from abroad.

There is only one problem with the videos quoted by the government press: according to a March 7 New York Times article, Korányi and Marton were conned by a man posing as a Swiss investor who recorded and leaked some of their conversations. The videos have been edited to leave out the questions asked by the mystery man , thus leaving no clue as to the context of the speakers’ supposedly self-disclosing statements.

The method is strikingly similar to that used a few years ago by the Israeli-based private intelligence firm Black Cube to discredit NGOs and journalists critical of the Hungarian government. In both cases, the manipulated recordings somehow ended up in the hands of the government-affiliated press.

A mysterious investor

The whole story begins with General Wesley Clark, the former European Commander-in-Chief of NATO. He was contacted by email in April 2023 by a man named George Koufis. They arranged a meeting and had dinner together in Prague and in Amsterdam to talk about Eastern Europe. Clark had previously worked in Ukraine with NGOs funded by George Soros, and he also spoke about this during their dinners. Recalling his talks with Koufis, the general later said: "He was very, very sophisticated. He seemed sincere".

Through Clark, Koufis gained access to Kati Marton. He introduced himself as a Swiss investor interested in renewable energy and the Eastern European market. It was no surprise to Marton when the conversation turned to Hungary, as she is of Hungarian descent, one of her weddings even took place in Budapest and she has written three books about the country her parents fled during the communist era.

The American communications consultant Eric Koch was approached around the same time as Marton. He was contacted on LinkedIn in the summer of 2023 with the cover story of someone looking for a consultant for Polish law firms. Koch was then invited to Amsterdam, where he met with Koufis in a hotel, who asked him about funding the Action for Democracy programme. Koch had only worked for the organisation for a short time in 2022 and claimed to know nothing about the group's finances, he could only speculate.

The mysterious man also approached Dávid Korányi, president of A4D, who previously served as the chief diplomatic adviser of Budapest's opposition mayor. "I had a bad feeling about this guy," Korányi recalled to the New York Times. He still agreed to a Zoom call though, where he gave Koufis an account of A4D's activities and funding, and also touched on his former duties in the administration of the city of Budapest.

Korányi's apprehensions were later confirmed. Months later it became obvious to those involved in the discussions that they had been played. The conversations were recorded and at the end of January, a fake X-account called MagaBabe started publishing edited versions of the videos. A total of five videos containing clips from the conversations were posted on X. The first three videos were posted between 29 and 31 January, the fourth on 15 February and the last one on 23 February, more than two weeks ago.

But what exactly is being said in these short videos which the government press says reveal "everything"? The extracts from the conversations with Marton and General Clark, published on X, only reveal things that have been known for a long time, such as the fact that George Soros has been funding several pro-democracy groups in Eastern and Central Europe since the late 1980s. Among other things, Marton mentions that they had a meeting with the US ambassador in Warsaw and that the restoration and the support of democracy worldwide are important to them.

Dávid Korányi didn't say anything much more interesting: in the video call, he outlined where A4D's funding comes from and pointed out that they are not afraid to criticise leaders like former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro or Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. He also noted that they do not specifically support the opposition, but as their values are largely the same as those of the opposition parties, they obviously benefit from their activities.

Korányi also mentioned that when the European Union was deciding about the EU funds for Hungary, the leadership of the city of Budapest obviously lobbied as well. He did not specify exactly what they had lobbied for, but the government-friendly media nevertheless claimed that Korányi and the capital's leadership had lobbied against Hungarian interests in the EU. The newspapers also pointed out that the organisation had contacts in the US government, which is actually not unusual for an NGO.

In the interviews, Erik Koch speculated that George Soros may be the biggest supporter of A4D, but having only worked for the organisation for a few months, he is the least connected to the group among those interviewed. Marton suggested that it is possible to deduce who might be interested in supporting A4D, but when Soros’s name was brought up, she said that she would rather not talk about him. Nevertheless, in February, Magyar Nemzet published an article with the headline "Action for Democracy admits that George Soros is their main donor", based on Koch’s and Marton’s statements.

NGOs critical of the government were framed exactly the same way

The exact identity of George Koufis, who appears to have conned the people in the videos, has not been established. The Swiss phone number and e-mail address used by the alleged investor are no longer in use. It is also unclear how MagaBabe came to possess the edited videos. A cybersecurity expert interviewed by the New York Times has confirmed that the MagaBabe account posting content praising Donald Trump is almost certainly a fake. The fact that MagaBabe has as many pictures of women in bikinis on its site as the softerotic cover of (the Hungarian government-friendly news site -TN) Origo should in itself be suspicious. The photos, which the profile claims feature its owner, are actually of a Swedish model. The profile description in itself is telling: “✝️ A southern girl looking for a nice Christian ✝️ man.”

The MagaBabe affair is hauntingly similar to the way Black Cube tricked NGOs using fake Linkedin profiles and bogus job ads prior to the 2018 and 2022 elections in Hungary.. This is what happened to Orsolya Jeney, former director of Amnesty International Hungary in 2022 and András Siewert, head of Migration Aid, in 2018. Their conversations were also recorded in secret, and the recordings ended up with the government press. At the time, the government denied any knowledge of Black Cube's operations.

The smear campaign based on the MagaBabe videos has not escaped the attention of the United States either. At least, this is suggested by what David Pressman, the US ambassador to Hungary told the New York Times, linking the operation to the Hungarian intelligence services. Pressman said: "We have paid attention to Hungary’s use of a component of its intelligence services to target American citizens”. According to the US ambassador, the MagaBabe case is also significant because it is the first time that Hungary has "conducted this kind of activity on US territory against its perceived adversaries".

These details do not seem to be of concern to the government-affiliated press though. Over the past month or so, new articles have been published about the MagaBabe videos on an almost daily basis. Origo alone has published more than 20 articles on the subject since the beginning of February. Mandiner, which represents the softer side of the Fidesz media empire, has been the one to primarily deal with the MagaBabe story while the other newspapers have been re-publishing their articles about the exposing of A4D. What all of these have in common is that they contain nothing new compared to the initial reports, they merely highlight a few details and then rehash the previous articles.

A good example of this is that last Monday, Mandiner wrote about the video released on 23 February in which General Wesley Clark spoke about the difficulty of removing an experienced and clever politician like Viktor Orbán. Then, on Friday, they quoted from the same video, only this time from Eric Koch, the former communications adviser to Korányi's Action for Democracy, who described how he had bombarded the US media with statements and various materials. This was presented by Mandiner under the headline ‘Korányi and his team mobilised an army of journalists to discredit our country’.

George Soros's spokesperson has denied to the New York Times that the Open Society Foundations have ever supported Action for Democracy or Hungarian opposition parties. "Action for Democracy is not and never has been a beneficiary of the Open Society Foundations. Neither do the Open Society Foundations support any political parties in Hungary."

Korányi believes that the timing is no coincidence. Given that he spoke with Koufis at the end of August 2023, he suggests that the reason they waited to post the videos until the Sovereignty Protection Office was set up on 1 February was so that there would be something to investigate.

The perfect case

It is no wonder that Korányi brought up the Sovereignty Protection Authority, as the whole MagaBabe affair seems to have been designed for the body set up under the pretext of foreign interference. In the wake of the clemency scandal and the upcoming municipal elections, it is also not a bad thing for the government to have something that can be used to attack the opposition parties which were emboldened by the fall of President Katalin Novák.

The Sovereignty Protection Authority actually owes its existence to the government's claim that the opposition was funded from abroad during the 2022 election campaign. They built a whole campaign around this, which is how the slogans about the 'rolling dollars' and 'dollar-funded left' were born. In line with this, the Sovereignty Protection Authority, which is tasked with investigating 'foreign interference', was granted unprecedented powers by the government. It can practically monitor anyone at any time, without even having to justify who it is targeting and why. The appointment of Tamás Lánczi, Orbán's former speech writer and pro-government political scientist who assisted in creating and publishing a list of civic activists (considered dangerous for the country -TN) as the head of the office, perfectly symbolises the purposes it serves.

It didn't take long for the Sovereignty Protection Authority to react to the MagaBabe case. About two weeks after the first video was released, on 12 February, the head of the agency, Tamás Lánczi, told Mandiner that the videos indicated potential criminal activity which needed to be investigated. He described what was said in the videos as unprecedented, saying that this proved once and for all that the opposition had been financed from abroad. Lánczi said that they were trying to obtain the complete recordings and had already contacted the relevant authorities. According to him, examining the original, unedited footage could also reveal where the money came from. Lánczi also hinted at the possibility that the Sovereignty Protection Office, which he leads, might even propose an amendment to the law once the investigation has been completed.

Speaking about the obviously edited videos with Mandiner, Lánczi said that the recordings had not been manipulated. He based his claim on the fact that "the speakers – the leaders of A4D – seem to be talking informally and at length about how they wanted to influence the Hungarian elections, on whose behalf and with whose money they had sought to bring the opposition to power".

However, what context these statements were made in, and what questions Korányi and the others were answering, is exactly what the videos do not reveal. Another thing Lánczi doesn't bring up is that it is not known who Korányi and the others were speaking with. This is an intriguing question because some of the conversations were likely recorded in secret, without the knowledge and consent of the other party.