The Hungarian foreign minister clapped back at Joe Biden in a videotaped message over the weekend after the Democrat called the conservative governments of Hungary and Poland “totalitarian regimes,” and claimed that President Donald Trump “supports all the thugs in the world.”
Biden made the comments disparaging America’s allies Poland and Hungary last Thursday during a televised town hall event.
“You see what’s happened in everything from Belarus to Poland to Hungary, and the rise of totalitarian regimes in the world,” Biden said during the ABC event. “This President embraces all the thugs in the world. I mean, he is best friends with the leader of North Korea, sending love letters.”
“It would be best if Joe Biden could answer some of those old questions that have been out there for a while, before attacking Central Europe,” Péter Szijjártó, Hungary’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade declared in a short video on his Facebook page, Saturday.
“It would be great if Joe Biden could tell us why he put pressure on the Ukrainian government to fire its chief prosecutor, and how all of this related to the investigation into his son’s Ukrainian energy deals grinding to a halt,” Szijjártó added, in a direct jab at the former VP’s alleged influence peddling operation.
Recently published emails from Hunter Biden’s computer have provided damning evidence that the elder Biden knew all about his son’s wheeling and dealings in foreign countries and that he himself had profited off of it.
The foreign minister began his video statement by reminiscing about the bad old days when Biden was vice president.
“We may still remember the kind of Central European policy the democrats pursued for 8 years; we may still recall the continuous lecturing, accusations and attacks,” FM Szijjártó said, reminding viewers that, during his term as Vice President, Joe Biden was “particularly busy” with foreign policy.
“We, Hungarians, have experienced this firsthand,” Szijjártó noted, in reference to the many times members of the U.S. diplomatic corps in Budapest openly took part in left-wing protests and published “extraordinarily biased” statements with the aim of supporting left-liberal parties and attacking the Hungarian government.
“There was a period during his term as VP,” the Hungarian FM continued, “when, and I exaggerate a bit, Biden spent more of his time outside D.C. in Ukraine than in rural America.”
“This was the time when his son happened to be a chief executive at a key Ukrainian energy company; this was also the time when there were deals in the Ukrainian energy sector that were suspected of being corrupt,” Szijjártó recalled.
The foreign minister called Biden’s statements about Hungary and Poland “completely false and undignified.”
Last February, Szijjártó told the Washington Times that relations between Washington and Budapest have greatly improved under President Trump.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban was recently granted a bilateral meeting with the U.S. president, the first in about a decade. Economic ties are strengthening. What the Hungarian government considers to be meddling in its internal affairs has largely ceased.
“Under the Obama administration, there were open attempts to interfere with the domestic issues of ours,” Szijjártó recalled, citing, for instance, how the highest ranking official in the U.S. embassy in Budapest “openly took part in opposition rallies” and placed visa bans on Hungarian government officials.
He said that under President Trump, in contrast, Hungary and the U.S. have enjoyed a bilateral relationship “based on mutual respect [and] strong economic cooperation.”
Szijjártó told the Times that he feared “the same approach [would] come back” should the Democrats take the White House in November.