They did not sneak in. They sat down on purpose.
On Tuesday, CodePink co-founder Medea Benjamin and two fellow activists walked into House Rayburn 2172 for a hearing titled “Trojan Horses: Covert Foreign Malign Influence Operations in America.” They planted themselves behind the witnesses in T-shirts backing the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Communist Party of Cuba. Then Benjamin turned to the official committee monitor, zoomed in on her own image, and started taking pictures. The whole stunt was built for the camera.
About thirty minutes in, at 2:39 p.m., South and Central Asia Subcommittee Chairman Bill Huizenga of Michigan stopped the hearing and had Capitol Police walk them out.
That is not a protest that got out of hand. That is a network that cannot help performing the thing Congress finally decided to name.
They’re coming in, trying to look like one thing, but we know that once they’re inside the gates that those doors are going to spring open, and there’s a whole other motivation for what they’re trying to do.
Huizenga told Fox News Digital the quiet part in one sentence. The horse is not wood anymore. It is a nonprofit, a Twitch stream, a campus rally, a pink T-shirt, and a donor-advised fund that looks American until you follow the wire.
Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.
The Show Was the Product
Huizenga did not treat the ejection as a surprise. He said the phones came out first. The crowd started filming. Then the disruption arrived on schedule.
This isn’t about discourse. This is about disruption. It’s all planned out. You see people in the crowd filming with their phones, getting ready. You knew something was going to happen because, all of a sudden, the phones would come out.
After police removed them, Benjamin was not finished. She posed by the House Foreign Affairs Committee placard. She pulled out a comb and fixed her hair before recording another clip. When Rep. Randy Fine of Florida left the room, she chased him down the hallway with questions while a teammate filmed. Two hours later CodePink posted a cleaned-up video and the wider network started passing it around. The hearing was the set. The hallway was the B-roll. Social media was the actual audience.
This is the same playbook that showed up a week earlier at the Institute of World Politics, when D.C. CodePink organizer Olivia DiNucci unfurled a “SANCTIONS KILL IN CUBA” banner and shouted about “global solidarity with Gaza and Cuba and ICE.” Security hauled her out. CodePink had the clip online within an hour and offered journalists “unbranded video footage.” Christine Balling, a former advisor to U.S. Special Operations Command South, said the quiet part then too.
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.
Heritage Foundation fellow Mike Gonzalez put it even shorter before Tuesday’s hearing. He told Benjamin to stop shilling for a communist tyranny. She declined the invitation.
Shanghai Money With American Letterhead
The person behind so much of this is not a mystery. Neville Roy Singham is an American-born tech tycoon who lives in Shanghai, talks like a Marxist, and married CodePink co-founder Jodie Evans in Jamaica in 2017. Fox News Digital has traced hundreds of millions through that marriage and the nonprofits around it. One tally puts $285 million into six core groups beginning in 2017.
Another documents $278 million flowing into organizations that House Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith has described as sowing discord inside the United States.
The named pipeline is ugly in its simplicity.
- About $22.44 million to the People’s Forum in New York
- About $16.76 million to Tricontinental
- About $1.33 million to CodePink
- About $1.098 million to BreakThrough BT Media
Those are not bake-sale totals. That is industrial-scale agitation dressed up as charity. In July, Smith’s Ways and Means Committee subpoenaed the People’s Forum, BreakThrough News, and Tricontinental after they produced, in the committee’s words, not a single responsive document. The groups called it a witch hunt and wrapped themselves in the First Amendment. Tax-exempt status is a privilege. It is not a cloak.
The Justice Department has gone further. In June, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York empaneled a grand jury to look at alleged money laundering, bank fraud, and wire fraud tied to Singham and the groups he funded. No charges have been filed.
Singham says he is acting on his own beliefs. Benjamin says CodePink does not take Chinese Communist Party money. Fine. Then register, produce the books, and stop acting shocked when Congress asks who is paying for the T-shirts.
Huizenga refused to treat the groups as separate little storefronts.
It’s a network. It’s not independent organizations or even people. You will see some of the same people at different organizations, rallies, or protests.
That network also includes the influencer circuit. Hasan Piker, the DSA-aligned Twitch star, posed in Havana with Evans on a CodePink Cuba trip that has drawn Treasury scrutiny. Huizenga has said adversarial nations use people like Piker as proxies to sell communism to Americans who think they are watching a homegrown rebel. The accent is American. The talking points are not.
The Horse Is Also Trying to Slow the Country Down
The T-shirt was theater. The policy damage is the point.
Sam Lyman, head of research at the Bitcoin Policy Institute and a former Treasury speechwriter, told the subcommittee that China-linked campaigns and Singham-backed organizers have helped stall or block about $23.6 billion in proposed U.S. AI and data-center investment. His research tracked 21 Party for Socialism and Liberation campaigns across 14 states.
The scoreboard is ten local moratoria, one permanent ban, and four rejected or withdrawn projects. Beijing lectures Americans about power bills and the climate while subsidizing its own compute. That is not environmentalism. That is industrial sabotage with a tote bag.
Rep. Darrell Issa of California said the quiet part about the other fashion of the moment, the sudden elite panic that America must “pace” its own machines.
Trojan horses are things like the announcement that we should slow down on AI. We are in a war in which the other side uses all the clandestine tools.
Fine called it cognitive warfare. Poison the platforms. Split the country. Make the protest look local. Keep the foreign principal off the chyron.
It’s a real issue, whether it’s on social media, influencers, protests, these things are all designed to destabilize our country.
Rep. Michael Baumgartner of Washington named the statute that already exists and almost never gets used with courage. If these groups are acting for foreign principals, they belong on a FARA filing at the Justice Department. If they will not file, refer them. America’s open system is a gift. It is also a door. A republic that will not ask who is standing in the doorway is not being tolerant. It is being looted.
Name the Who
Huizenga kept repeating one word because the rest of Washington has spent a decade pretending the word is rude.
Transparency. Transparency is the watchword. We really need to make sure that people know not only the why, but the who is behind all this.
That is not complicated. Americans can hold sincere views about war, sanctions, and police power. What they cannot do, and still call it grassroots, is take a Shanghai fortune, a Havana junket, and an Iranian slogan, then demand the cameras treat them as a church bake sale.
The ancient story did not end because Troy lacked feelings. It ended because Troy brought the gift inside the wall and refused to look in the belly.
And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them.
Congress finally turned on the lights in Rayburn 2172. CodePink sat in the glow, smiled for the official feed, and then complained about the escort out. The horse is not outside the gates anymore. It has been living in the nonprofit corridor, the influencer queue, and the tax-exempt file cabinet. The only remaining question is whether the country will keep holding the door.
