For nearly a decade, China, Cuba, and Iran have been funding American activists, nonprofits, and social media influencers to push foreign propaganda inside the United States. Congress is now hauling the operation into the light.
A financial investigation traced 223 transactions totaling $591 million across five continents between 2017 and 2025 — all connected to a network of domestic proxies allegedly doing the bidding of America's adversaries on American soil. The money trail leads from an American tech tycoon living in Shanghai to protest groups operating openly in Washington, D.C.
Rep. Bill Huizenga, the Michigan Republican who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on South and Central Asia, is driving the investigation with a hearing titled "Trojan Horses: Covert Foreign Malign Influence Operations in America." The hearing examines how adversarial nations use domestic proxies — activists, nonprofit organizations, social media personalities — to push propaganda that undermines American interests from the inside.
Huizenga named the proxies directly. "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," he said. "My goal is to raise the curtain to expose these operations and stop them from undermining our national security, capitalism and the American Dream."
At the center of the financial web sits Neville Roy Singham, an American tech tycoon who relocated to Shanghai. The $591 million in traced transactions flows through organizations and entities connected to Singham's network across five continents. That money didn't just sit in bank accounts. It funded operations.
One of those operations is CodePink, the left-wing political group co-founded by Jodie Evans and Medea Benjamin. Christine Balling, a former advisor to U.S. Special Operations Command South, laid out the problem at a September 8 panel at the Institute of World Politics. "CodePink and other organizations like it essentially act like Trojan horses," Balling said. "They burst in onto the scene, and they're meant to disrupt and destroy from within."
The disruption isn't theoretical. CodePink organizer Olivia DiNucci was spotted at Church Street and 16th Street NW in Washington, D.C., holding a banner reading "SANCTIONS KILL IN CUBA." DiNucci posted about it openly, writing, "There is global solidarity with Gaza and Cuba and ICE here... the liberation of our people is rooted in our neighbors!" That's not grassroots activism. That's messaging lifted from Havana's propaganda playbook, delivered on an American street corner by an American citizen working for an organization connected to hundreds of millions in foreign-linked money.
Michael Gonzalez, a Cuban American and senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, examined the same networks at the same panel and reached the same conclusion as Balling: this is a national security problem that festered while the people responsible for catching it were looking elsewhere.
The Treasury Department has tools to examine exactly these kinds of foreign-influence financial networks. The question isn't whether the tools exist. It's why they weren't used sooner.
Huizenga's subcommittee is doing what oversight is supposed to do — following the money, naming the proxies, and forcing the connections into the public record. For years, these organizations wrapped themselves in the language of social justice while their financial arteries ran back to governments that imprison dissidents, crush free speech, and export instability.
Two hundred twenty-three transactions. Five continents. Nearly a decade. And the hearing is just getting started.