After US President Donald Trump announced another meeting with Vladimir Putin, this time in Budapest, HuffPost journalists asked the White House why this particular city was chosen for the talks.
The editors recalled that it was in the Hungarian capital in 1994 that the Budapest Memorandum was signed, under which Ukraine renounced its nuclear weapons in exchange for security guarantees, specifically from Russia. Moscow violated these commitments by occupying Crimea in 2014, unleashing a war in Donbas, and then launching a full-scale invasion in 2022.
When asked by a HuffPost reporter who exactly decided to hold the meeting in this city, Press Secretary Carolyn Leavitt responded with a schoolyard joke: "Your mother did it." White House Communications Director Stephen Cheng later echoed the same sentiment.
The journalists then sent a clarification, asking whether Levitt considered such a response appropriate. She responded: "I find it ridiculous that you even consider yourself a journalist. You're a leftist propagandist who no one takes seriously. Stop sending me your biased and pointless questions."
HuffPost said it would continue to ask questions of Trump's press secretaries, "especially those they don't want to answer," and called the White House officials' behavior unacceptable.
