Former Hungarian PM Gordon Bajnai's company group is closely linked to the left wing of the US Democratic Party. The key employees in the company group all hail from the ranks of progressive democrats, according to Index. In a series of article of articles, the Hungarian news site presents the activity of the companies of the former leftist PM and his intelligence minister.

As V4NA also mentioned earlier, the Hungarian Index is presenting in a series of articles the activities of the companies of former Hungarian PM Gordon Bajnai and his Intelligence Minister Adam Ficsor (delegated by the Democratic Coalition (DK) party). The companies have been created to support online campaigns. The first article reveals that the Hungarian primaries might have been influenced or even decided by Gordon Bajnai and his circle through the data analytics and campaign consultancy companies he’d set up with his intelligence minister.

The portal has published another article, writing that Mr Bajnai and Mr Ficsor’s company group has numerous links with the left wing of the US Democratic Party, and its most important employees are all from the progressive democrats. According to the portal, Datapraxis OÜ, an Estonia-based company of the DatAdat network, has US managers in addition to Viktor Szigetvari, Mr Bajnai’s former chief of staff.

The director of the company is Mark Steitz, who previously designed a so-called targeting system for Democratic President Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign. The director of Datad.at’s Estonian branch is Laura Quinn, earlier Joe Biden’s senior communications and economic policy advisor and former deputy chief of staff to former Democratic Vice President Al Gore. She held leading positions in several presidential campaigns of the Democrats.

Steitz and Quinn jointly own Catalist LLC, a US company founded in 2006 to participate in progressive election campaigns. Catalist LLC was launched with the help of an USD 1M donation by George Soros, with futher support received from the Tides Foundation, which can also be linked to the businessman.

An investigation of the latter organisation by the US tax authority between 2007 and 2009 revealed that the George Soros’s Open Society Foundations and other foundations used it as a distributor for Tides to forward their donations under their own name to the NGOs they preferred. In addition, the Democracy Alliance, an organisation supporting the US Democratic Party, has also provided significant funding to Catalist LLC, a major facilitator of Democrat campaigns in America.

Besides their links with Catalyist, many – all associated with the Democrats – also happen to work on Gordon Bajnai and Adam Ficsor’s team.

Speaking of this, here is what Patrick Frank, the director of communications at Datad.at, said in a conversation obtained by Index:

„We have a relationship with various other folks in the political space that do either polling, messaging or a sort of voter modelling. And again, most of our networks comes from the American left, and specifically the, you know, pretty far left.”

Datadat’s director of communications added:

“And so we have massive networks in the Democratic Party that we can sort of leverage when we need to bring in experts in various parts of campaigns.”

Mr Frank himself was formerly director of communications for ActBlue, which he describes as „the fundraising powerhouse of the left” in America, and he also worked as a regional director for Barack Obama’s re-election campaign before becoming the communications director of a company linked to Mr Bajnai and his circles.

Benjy Cook, the Chief Technology Officer of DatAdat, is also linked to the left wing of the Democratic Party. In the 2020 election, he supported the Democrats Abroad campaign to help Israeli-Americans vote in the election, and personally endorsed Bernie Sanders’ candidacy. Mr Cook also played a major role in the campaign to oust right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and is still an advisor to the leftist Meretz party in Israel.

Datad.at’s senior advisor is Avi Rabin Havt, an American campaign strategist who was Bernie Sanders’s deputy campaign manager before the 2020 election, but has also worked on the campaigns of prominent Democrats, such as Al Gore and John Kerry.

DatAdat makes no secret of its affiliation with the American left and of representing the interests of the Democrats.

Ari Rabin Havt, a senior advisor at Datad.at, said the following in a discussion:

“Let me give an example of that. We were in Hungary, doing some stuff, and we realised we needed somebody with field. So, Adam [Adam Ficsor, the owner of DatAdat and former intelligence minister in Gordon Bajnai’s government – ed.] saw this and I made a phone call and one of the best American field officers was on a plane going to Hungary in 48 hours, was on the ground setting up a field programme.”

Perhaps it is because of its US support that DatAdat its only offering its services to left-wing clients. As Mr Ficsor put it, “We only work with progressives.”

The Bajnai government’s former intelligence minister also noted in a conversation obtained by the Hungarian Index news portal that they do not have to advertise their services as their partners keep recommending them to others. Mr Ficsor explained that they are very cautious and they are careful not to maintain an overly high profile, because they have enough clients who recommend them to others. „So, we don’t usually advertise our services,” he said.

According to Index, DatAdat’s team is clearly trying to hide its activities. Not only are they handling Hungarian voters’ data in Estonia instead of Hungary but, according to the news outlet, they are also doing most of their campaign work in Hungary from Austria.

In connection with the outlined network of contacts in the US, the portal recalls what was said by Gyula Gansperger, one of the key figures in the City Hall scandal. Mr Gansperger, who is also a former business associate of Gordon Bajnai, referred to Hungary’s ex-PM as an “one of his old battlefield buddies,” adding that „there is more than just friendship between them.” Mr Gansperger described Mr Bajnai as follows:

“In Hungary, – I think – there are basically foreign forces and financiers behind the movement of the whole opposition. (…) Who are these forces? One of these is, let’s put it this way, the Soros Empire. The other part is composed of big-capital groups, that is, from Germany and especially the United States, who want to have influence here. I think Gordon is their man.”