Hungarian government proxy is spending a fortune to influence public opinion in the US

The Danube Institute, one of the main international ideological workshops of the Orbán government, has paid more than 1.64 million USD to its foreign collaborators over the past three years. The institute is building a network primarily in the United States, together with the Heritage Foundation, which is underwriting Donald Trump’s unofficial election platform, Project 2025. There have been public figures in the US who have been specifically commissioned to write articles for US newspapers, which may violate US laws on foreign lobbies. We have gained insight into the contracts of the Batthyány Lajos Foundation.

Last year, we wrote about the Danube Institute, one of the Orbán government’s main tools for networking abroad, mainly in the US. The institute was founded “to represent conservative and national values and thinking”, which in practice means two main activities: organising conferences and funding the work of a number fellows, among which are foreign journalists and other media representatives, writers, academics and staff of foreign think-tanks.

The Danube Institute is in practice a project of the publicly funded Batthyány Foundation (BLA).

BLA has received billions of forints of public money from the Prime Minister’s Office, led by PM Viktor Orbán’s second-in-command Antal Rogán.

A significant part of the funding is being spent in Hungary to organizations promoting the Orbán-government’s message, such as the Centre for Fundamental Rights, which is also well-known for their campaigns abroad.

Skyrocketing spending

Even more interesting, however, is the Batthyány Foundation’s activities under the Danube Institute brand. In September, we submitted a public interest request to the BLA, asking for contracts signed with the Foundation’s visiting lecturers abroad between 2022 and 2024, as well as contracts signed for geopolitical summits held since then.

The contracts show that Danube Inistitute’s payments to visiting scholars and speakers have increased spectacularly over the past three years:

In 2022, it paid 76.76 million HUF under research contracts. Last year, the salaries of visiting researchers amounted to HUF 179 million, and this year’s expenditure has already reached a record high: the public interest foundation paid researchers a total of HUF 284.6 million.

Danube Institute’s fellows have also received funding to participate in conferences, in addition to visiting researcher assignments. These include the Geopolitical Summits organised jointly with the Heritage Foundation – the fourth edition of this conference was held this autumn, with dozens of speakers, and was opened by Balázs Orbán.

Speakers’ fees varied widely, with the highest fee of more than 36.6 million forints being paid to one of the Institute’s guests this year (these contracts are also anonymised). The typical speaker fee is more modest, in the range of 2-400 thousand forints, and there were 2 speakers who received no fee at all – however, hotel accommodation was paid for all by the BLA.

Speakers at the geopolitical conferences received a total of 13.9 million HUF last year, 10.27 million HUF in 2023, and at this year’s event the total fee for speakers was 44 million HUF – not including the cost of conference logistics.

Together, this spending amounts to 1.64 million USD.

An impact on Trump’s  agenda

It is important to note here that the BLA, in response to our public interest request, only allowed access to the file, where the contracts were shown with the names redacted. However, the details of some of the contracts can be used to infer the identity of the foreign partner.

One contract, signed in 2024, states that the visiting lecturer will write a 10-page paper “on Hungarian migration policy and lessons learned for the state of Texas” for $8,400 (HUF 3.1 million). In September this year, a paper on this topic was published on the Danube Institute website, authored by Melissa Ford Maldonado, policy director of the Texas Public Policy Foundation.

Before joining the Texas think-tank, Maldonado worked for Donald Trump’s administration in the White House, as a fellow at the Office of American Innovation and then the Domestic Policy Council. The Texas Public Policy Foundation is known primarily for its energy policy positions, denying that climate change is caused by human activity and arguing against the reduction of fossil fuels, which has received support from oil giants such as Exxon, Chevron and Koch Brothers.

The Texas Public Policy Foundation is also notable for its membership on the Project 2025 Advisory Board.

Project 2025 is the controversial program championed by Heritage Foundation, an official partner of the Danube Institute, written to be Donald Trump’s  presidential agenda, in case  he is reelected. It aims to radically transform the US administration by filling every possible federal post with people loyal to Trump and the cause of conservatism, giving the president unchecked power.

It is no secret that the programme was influenced by the Orbán government’s concentration of power in Hungary. The cooperation between the Heritage Foundation and the Hungarian government’s proxies (BLA, Center for Fundamental Rights, MCC) became more active after the 2020 elections, and at the same time the formerly dominant leadership of the Reagan neo-conservative principles was pushed into the background.

The new president of Heritage, Kevin Roberts, elected in 2021, signed a formal agreement with the Danube Institute in 2022.

Project 2025 came under the spotlight during this year’s election campaign, with critics claiming that the programme would lead to the breakdown of democratic norms and the rule of law – as more and more details of the Project emerged, the backlash became so negative that Trump was forced to distance himself from it.

The contracts of Rod Dreher, an American journalist living in Hungary and head of the Danube Insititute network project, can also be identified. The 2022 contract includes Dreher’s book “Living without Lies”, for the distribution of which he received a grant. In a contract signed in 2023, the visiting researcher undertakes to deliver the manuscript of his “new book Wonderwold” by the end of the year. Dreher is due to publish a book with a similar title this year.

Dreher was working for a gross monthly salary of $5,666 (2 million forints) in 2022, while the more recent contract is for a monthly salary of $8,750 (3.2 million forints).

Based on his research topics (Middle East conflict, terrorism, anti-Semitism) and the TRENDS think-tank mention, we can recognise the contract of US academic Jeffrey Kaplan, who worked for a salary of $5,800 between 2022 and 2024. In addition to research, Kaplan has been asked to network, and his contracts include finding more conservative researchers on behalf of DI, as well as organising a book launch specifically in the US.

Defending Slovakian PM Fico

In a contract for 2024, the foreign visiting scholar agreed to a monthly salary of $4,500 (1.65 million forints) to “write at least two articles of at least 650 words per month for American and European media”.

The contract was accompanied by a list of accepted press products by name: American Affairs, American Conservative, Claremont Review of Books, European Conservative, First Things, GB News, National Catholic Register, National Review, Newsweek, The American Mind, the American Spectator, the Critic, the Federalist, The Imaginative Conservative, The New Criterion, The National Interest, the Spectator, Touchstone, UnHerd.

Several BLA guest researchers have published articles in these journals in recent years. Most likely, however, the contract was signed by Michael O’Shea, whose articles have appeared in almost all of the papers on the list – in this July article in The American Mind magazine, for example, he defended Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico and the pro-Russian Georgian government, alongside Orbán.

O’Shea was also contracted by DI last year, wen the American journalist was also paid $4,500 in 2023 for writing articles, among other things. In their 2023 contract BLA also asked for “two articles a month of at least 650 words” “especially on Hungarian family policy and Hungarian geopolitical issues”. At that time, these were not to be written explicitly for US newspapers, but “for US and European media”.

The recent contract however explicitly states that the contractor must publish articles in specific US news outlets.

Possible violation of the Forgeig Agent Registration Act

Sponsoring publications and conferences in the United States on political topics is very close to what the Orbán government calls interference in domestic politics, a violation of national sovereignty, at least when done in Hungary. In the United States, the FARA act requires that participants of such activities register in the Justice Department’s foreign lobbyists’ database (FARA Database).

Currently,  a few  lobbyists paid by the Hungarian government can be found in the FARA database. One of them is right-wing journalist David Reaboi, who according to his registration documents was paid to defend the Hungarian government from critics on Twitter. In one of the paid posts, included as an attachment, Reaboi wrote:

“I support Hungary – especially when the media and hard left NGOs attack them. I am not here for the money.”

Also listed in the database as a lobbyist for the Orbán government is the PR firm Policy Impact Strategic Communications, which was hired to organise positive media coverage for the Orbán government. It was this company that organised Péter Szijjártó’s interview on Fox TV’s Tucker Carlson Tonight. The choice of programme is not a coincidence, as the director of the company, Richard Carlson, is the father of the presenter.

FARA has been in the news recently in relation to a Russian-backed media company, TENET Media: in September, the US Department of Justice prosecuted two Russian nationals for money laundering and lobbying violations for secretly funneling Russian state money to the US-based company.

TENET Media employed public figues such as Dave Rubin who in 2023 also spoke a Danube Institute event. One of TENET’s founders, Lauren Chen was a speaker at a festival of Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), another proxy of the Orbán government. According to the DoJ’s indictment, TENET’s money laundering scheme also involved a Hungarian shell entity, the name of which remains unknonw.

Despite all, Danube Institute or their paid fellows are not currently registered as lobbyists in the FARA database, even though US media campaigns paid by the Hungarian state is clearly lobbying under US law.

Interestingly, the Danube Institute does appear on the registration sheet of another organisation, The White House Writers Group Inc. The organisation organised a conference funded by a Polish state-backed foundation and published a detailed account of its expenses. DI leader John O’Sullivan, who received a speaker’s fee, also appears here. DI is thus listed as a partner of a Polish registered lobbyist organisation, but its staff are not listed as lobbyists for the Hungarian government, although they are engaged in similar activities.

Written and translated by Zalán Zubor. Hungarian version of this story can be found here.