The U.S. State Department's spokeswoman called China a "thuggish regime" for releasing personal information on an American diplomat who met with opposition protesters in Hong Kong, escalating a war of words over protests that have wracked the territory.
"I don't think that leaking an American diplomat's private information — pictures, names of their children — I don't think that that's a formal protest, that is what a thuggish regime would do," Morgan Ortagus said at a State Department briefing on Thursday. "That's not how a responsible nation would behave."
Asked if she was directly calling China a "thuggish regime," she responded, "Yeah."