'Trojan Horses': US Congress Targets Hidden Foreign Influence Networks Tied to China, Cuba and Iran

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A Protest Interrupts a Panel on Cuba

Last week, in downtown Washington, D.C., a small panel discussion turned into political theater. Christine Balling, a former advisor to U.S. Special Operations Command South, was speaking about the security threats posed by Cuba's communist government.

A young activist, Olivia DiNucci, suddenly stood up holding a banner reading "SANCTIONS KILL IN CUBA." She shouted slogans about Gaza, Cuba and immigration enforcement before security removed her from the room.

The banner carried a small logo: CodePink. This is a left-wing activist group that has organized trips to Cuba and publicly backs the island's communist government.

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Why This Matters for a Congressional Hearing

The disruption wasn't random. It happened just before House lawmakers opened a hearing titled "Trojan Horses: Covert Foreign Malign Influence Operations in America," held Tuesday by the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on South and Central Asia.

The hearing looks at a broader question: are American activists, nonprofits, media outlets and online influencers being used — knowingly or not — to advance the goals of foreign governments? Subcommittee chairman Rep. Bill Huizenga (R-Mich.) said the goal is to expose these networks. Three witnesses were scheduled to testify, focusing respectively on Cuban influence operations, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) strategy, and financial campaigns tied to America's data-center industry.

Balling, who witnessed the protest firsthand, described groups like CodePink as acting like "Trojan horses" — appearing to champion peace or humanitarian causes, while in practice sowing division inside American society.

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Tracing the Money: The Singham Network

At the center of this controversy is Neville Roy Singham, an American-born tech entrepreneur who made his fortune with the software company ThoughtWorks and now lives in Shanghai. Singham has spoken publicly in support of the Chinese Communist Party and its global ambitions.

An investigation by Fox News Digital reported that Singham-linked entities funneled roughly $278 million between 2017 and 2025 into six nonprofit organizations, which then distributed money further into a network estimated at around 2,000 organizations worldwide. The six groups named in that reporting were the People's Support Foundation, the Justice and Education Fund, the People's Forum, Tricontinental, CodePink, and BreakThrough BT Media.

CodePink co-founder Jodie Evans married Singham in 2017. Fox News Digital's reporting states CodePink itself received about $1.3 million through this network, while far larger sums went to affiliated nonprofits that direct funding to activist projects on multiple continents.

This is not solely a Fox News finding. A 2023 investigation by The New York Times separately reported that Singham had built a financial network — worth at least $275 million by its accounting — funding nonprofits and media outlets that echoed Chinese government messaging across the United States, Africa, Asia and Latin America. The Times also confirmed that Singham-connected entities have given CodePink more than $1 million since 2017, a sum it said represented over a quarter of the group's budget.

Singham and the organizations he has funded deny acting on behalf of the Chinese government, and none has been criminally charged. Singham did not respond to requests for comment cited in the reporting.

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What Investigators Are Looking At

According to Fox News Digital, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York has opened a federal grand jury investigation examining whether financial crimes — such as money laundering or wire fraud — occurred in how funds moved through Singham's network of shell entities and nonprofits. No charges have been filed, and the proceedings remain confidential.

Separately, the House Ways and Means Committee has already subpoenaed several nonprofits connected to the network over tax questions. Tuesday's Foreign Affairs Subcommittee hearing expands that scrutiny into the realm of national security and foreign influence.

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A Familiar Pattern: Activism and Adversarial Messaging

Lawmakers and witnesses at the hearing pointed to a recurring pattern: American activist groups amplifying messaging that lines up with the interests of the Chinese Communist Party, the Cuban government, or Iran, often under the language of anti-war or social-justice activism.

One example raised was Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, who traveled to Cuba with a CodePink delegation earlier this year and was photographed there with CodePink co-founder Jodie Evans. Subcommittee chairman Huizenga said such influencers can act as informal messengers spreading foreign narratives to large domestic audiences.

Analysts who study these networks note this overlap is sometimes referred to as a "red-green alliance" — a reference to socialist and communist groups (red) cooperating with Islamist-aligned organizations (green) on shared campaigns, such as anti-Israel demonstrations.

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Balancing Free Speech and National Security

The debate raises a genuinely difficult question for American democracy: where is the line between legitimate protest and covert foreign influence? Groups like CodePink describe themselves as anti-war organizations exercising constitutionally protected free speech, not agents of any government.

Critics counter that the issue isn't the right to protest itself, but undisclosed financial ties to actors whose interests may not align with American democratic values — something they argue deserves public transparency rather than censorship.

For practitioners of peaceful spiritual movements like Falun Dafa, which has for decades documented the Chinese Communist Party's efforts to suppress and discredit civil society both inside China and abroad, this congressional scrutiny echoes a long-standing warning: authoritarian states often work through indirect, deniable channels rather than open declarations, making transparency efforts like this hearing an important tool of accountability.

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What Comes Next

The hearing is not expected to produce immediate legislation, but it does formally place these financial and organizational questions inside a national-security framework, rather than treating them purely as tax or campaign-finance matters. Whether the subpoenaed nonprofits comply with document requests, and whether the federal grand jury investigation in New York leads to charges, will likely shape how far this inquiry goes.

For now, groups like CodePink continue their public activism unabated — as shown by the swift, professionally produced video of DiNucci's protest that appeared on CodePink's social media channels within an hour of the disruption.

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