‘Trojan horses’ in America: Congress probes influence networks tied to China, Iran and Cuba
Last Tuesday, at the corner of Church Street and 16th Street NW, blocks from the White House, Christine Balling, a former advisor to U.S. Special Operations Command South, led a panel discussion on the national security threat that communist-run Cuba poses to the U.S.
Suddenly, a fresh-faced former college basketball star, Olivia DiNucci, stood up to steal the stage at the Institute of World Politics, yelling as she clutched a hand-painted banner: "SANCTIONS KILL IN CUBA."
"There is global solidarity with Gaza and Cuba and ICE here," DiNucci shouted breathlessly, as security officials grabbed her banner and pushed her out a side door as she kept yelling, "because the liberation of our people is rooted in our neighbors!"
In small print, the banner had DiNucci's organizational and ideological affiliation: "CODEPINK."
DiNucci is a D.C.-based political organizer with CodePink, a left-wing political agitation group, spending her days and evenings as a professional protester and a regular gadfly, disrupting dinners, hearings and conferences as a sidekick to CodePink co-founder Susan Medea Benjamin. Their group supports the Communist Party of Cuba and has led caravans to the island nation, as Treasury Department officials investigate whether they violated any laws barring Americans from doing business with the communist regime.
For Balling and her co-panelist, Michael Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a Cuban American firmly opposed to the communist government of Cuba, DiNucci's political theater wasn't the benign act of an "anti-war" group, as CodePink describes itself.
"CodePink – and other organizations like it – essentially act like Trojan horses. They burst in onto the scene, and they're meant to disrupt and destroy from within," Balling told Fox News Digital.
"They're really interested in dividing America and, in doing so, weakening it," she continued, "and increasing the friction between Americans by convincing some Americans that the American idea, the American dream, the freedoms we enjoy, all that sort of thing, that they are lies and they're not worth fighting for, and that our enemies are our victims."
The confrontation comes as House lawmakers convene a hearing on Tuesday, titled "Trojan Horses: Covert Foreign Malign Influence Operations in America," to examine a broad question: how do American activists, nonprofit organizations, media operations and social media influencers, like Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, advance the interests of adversarial nations, including China, Iran and Cuba, inside the United States?
Piker joined CodePink's delegation to Cuba earlier this year, posing for a photo in Havana with CodePink cofounder, Jodie Evans, both of them also drawing Treasury Department scrutiny.
"Adversarial nations like China, Russia, and Cuba conduct malign influence operations here in the United States by utilizing social media influencers such as Hasan Piker as proxies to promote communism and push their false propaganda," Rep. Bill Huizenga, R-Mich., chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on South and Central Asia, told Fox News Digital.
"My goal is to raise the curtain to expose these operations and stop them from undermining our national security, capitalism and the American Dream," Huizenga said.
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The hearing will bring together several strands of alleged foreign influence that Fox News Digital has documented over the past year through investigations into money, political organizing, overseas travel, media operations and relationships between American activists and foreign entities and interests. Most of the groups fall into the "red-green alliance" of socialist and communist groups, symbolized by the color red, working closely with Islamist groups, such as the anti-Israel organization Students for Justice in Palestine, reflected by the color green, a symbol of Islam.
The largest financial network examined in Fox News Digital's reporting centers on Neville Roy Singham, an American-born tech tycoon who lives in Shanghai, late last year standing on a stage at the Golden Tulip Hotel during a conference on the "Global South," delivering a speech supporting the Chinese Communist Party, China's leader, Xi Jinping and China's "new world order."
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A five-part Fox News Digital investigation published earlier this year examined 223 transactions totaling $591 million across five continents between 2017 and 2025, tracing the flow of money through multiple layers of organizations and into a transnational network estimated at approximately 2,000 organizations.
In 2017, Singham married Evans, the CodePink co-founder, in a ceremony in Jamaica attended by Benjamin and other pro-communist leaders. The Fox News Digital analysis documented $278 million flowing from Singham into six core nonprofit organizations that promulgate anti-America, pro-China propaganda, beginning in 2017: BreakThrough BT Media Inc., CodePink Women for Peace, Justice and Education Fund Inc., People's Forum Inc., People's Support Foundation Ltd. and Tricontinental Ltd.
The organizations and their executives have denied any wrongdoing and allege they are the target of anti-communist "witch hunts." Singham hasn't responded to repeated requests for comment.
Huizenga and the hearing's witnesses say Congress must examine whether adversarial governments are influencing American political discourse through domestic messengers while keeping the foreign power itself at arm's length.
Fox News Digital's reporting followed the money to the six nonprofits:
That was only the first layer. The six nonprofits that directly received Singham money subsequently distributed approximately $163 million to 52 organizations — including themselves — and five geographic regions identified in financial records.
Eleven groups at another layer distributed approximately $150 million into four nonprofits and five geographic regions, including $23 million directed to Sub-Saharan Africa, according to the Fox News Digital analysis.
The financial architecture has been accompanied by political organizing, media operations and ideological activity that includes the fresh example of political theater that CodePink unleashed at this week's disruption at the Institute of World Politics' panel on Cuba.
Balling, the former advisor to U.S. Special Operations Southern Command, used the opportunity to illustrate exactly the point that the Heritage Foundation's Gonzalez and she were arguing.
"Their method of operation," she said, "is to disrupt, of course, to get the soundbites on Twitter or Instagram or what have you, but they are not ever interested in a respectful dialogue."
"What was extraordinary is I was actually about to talk about CodePink and the Democratic Socialists of America, the DSA, as both being members of the largest pro-Cuban regime organization in the United States, called the National Network on Cuba," said Balling.
"And so the fact that she stood up and tried to disrupt the event was just a wonderful example for the audience," of the antics of CodePink. "They are actually really a mouthpiece for anti-American causes, which happen to be very pro-Chinese Communist Party causes and...the Castro regime."
On cue, at 6:42 p.m., less than an hour after the event had ended at about 6 p.m., CodePink posted a carefully curated and captioned 1-minute-35-second video of the DiNucci outburst on X. The same video went up on CodePink's official YouTube channel.
Balling said CodePink's messaging promoted "the interests of, frankly, our enemies, the Chinese Communist Party and then the Cuban regime."
"Their method of operation," she said, "is to disrupt, of course, to get the soundbites on Twitter or Instagram or what have you, but they are not ever interested in a respectful dialogue."
Sure enough, CodePink posted the video on its official Instagram account, tagging DiNucci.
"Frankly, had she been willing to stop screaming," said Balling, Gonzalez and she "would have actually been thrilled to have a debate with her, but that's not their way of operating."
By the end of the night, the disruption had also become a press release on CodePink's website, listing DiNucci herself as the "media contact" and offering journalists "unbranded video footage."
Fox News Digital's Jesse Watson and Brooke Curto contributed to this report.