Former senior U.S. State Department official Mike Benz stated in an interview with former British Prime Minister Liz Truss that the United States and the EU accused Georgia and Hungary of “Russian law” solely because these countries enacted legislation on transparency of funding.

Benz discussed the issue of freedom of speech in Europe, emphasising that the U.S. State Department is now backing the Free Speech Initiative across the continent.

He highlighted that freedom of speech has been an unwavering cornerstone in Europe for a century; yet in the past ten years, financial support has increasingly facilitated censorship rather than safeguarding authentic free expression.

“What you see is that the media has been completely apoplectic over this, arguing that this is like a Russian influence operation. They say the U.S. government is funding groups that promote free speech because right-wing populist parties in Europe want free speech so they can spread their propaganda. And those groups, the Russians want them to win because they’re sceptical of various things that NATO is doing, or they’re sceptical of the EU. And so they are now arguing that you need some sort of transparency law in Europe to make sure that every bit of grant-making from the U.S. is public. And I completely support that.

By the way, the irony is that just 15 months ago, that very class of EU bureaucrats and financial stakeholders were threatening sanctions on Hungary, Georgia, and three other countries in Europe who wanted those transparency laws. In fact, they called it ‘the Russian law’ if you wanted transparency about it, because Russia passed something like that in 2012,” Mike Benz has said.

A former senior U.S. State Department official explained that Russia had no issue with transparency laws; the real problem lay with the United States and the European Union. He stated that the EU had directly threatened Hungary: if the parliament passed legislation requiring all NGOs receiving more than USD 23,000 in government funding to publicly disclose their sources, the EU would respond by freezing billions of dollars in aid to Hungary.

“Why would the United States and European Union under the Biden administration have a problem with that transparency law? Because they’re flooding the entire market of Hungarian media, Hungarian NGOs, Hungarian academia, and civil society organisations with U.S. and EU funds to pump up an AstroTurf political movement to unseat Orbán, so that they can get Ukraine into the EU and knock out the only veto vote right now in the entire EU,” Mika Benz stated.