WASHINGTON — White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt continued attacking HuffPost on Monday but failed to answer the question that led to her childish response last week: Who picked Budapest as the site for the next meeting between President Donald Trump and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin?
The Hungarian capital was the site where Russia promised three decades ago not to invade Ukraine if it gave up the nuclear weapons it inherited upon the breakup of the Soviet Union — a pledge Putin began violating in 2014 and continues doing so with near-nightly drone and missile attacks targeting Ukrainian civilians. Hungary’s autocratic leader, Viktor Orban, is also the only leader in the European Union and NATO sympathetic to Putin’s nearly 4-year-old full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Given that history, HuffPost asked Leavitt and White House communications director Steven Cheung who picked Budapest. She responded, “Your mom did,” and Cheung followed up a minute later with: “Your mom.”
On Monday, Leavitt told her 1.6 million followers on the social media platform X, formerly Twitter: “For context, S.V. Dáte of the Huffington Post is not a journalist interested in the facts. He is a left-wing hack who has consistently attacked President Trump for years and constantly bombards my phone with Democrat talking points. Just take a look at @svdate’s feed, it reads like an anti-Trump personal diary.”
She then posted a screenshot of HuffPost’s question and her responses. “Activists who masquerade as real reporters do a disservice to the profession.”
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She did not, however, answer the original question.
She also did not respond to HuffPost’s query Monday about Trump’s reported pushing of Putin’s talking points during his White House meeting Friday with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that Ukraine should give up some of its sovereign territory to Russia as a way to end Putin’s war.
Trump announced soon after Zelenskyy had left that the current battles in Ukraine should serve as the new territorial lines — effectively rewarding Putin, who has been charged with war crimes by the International Criminal Court for starting a war of aggression.