On Sept. 8, 2026, a panel at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C., examined the national security threat posed by communist run Cuba.

The event took place near the corner of Church Street and 16th Street NW, several blocks from the White House, as reported by Fox News.

Christine Balling, a former advisor to U.S. Special Operations Command South, was leading the discussion when CodePink organizer Olivia DiNucci stood and interrupted.

DiNucci held up a hand-painted banner declaring, "SANCTIONS KILL IN CUBA."

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"There is global solidarity with Gaza and Cuba and ICE here," DiNucci shouted as security officials seized the banner and escorted her through a side door.

She continued yelling, "because the liberation of our people is rooted in our neighbors!"

The banner identified DiNucci’s affiliation with CodePink, a left-wing political agitation group that describes itself as opposing war.

DiNucci regularly appears alongside CodePink cofounder Susan Medea Benjamin while disrupting dinners, hearings and conferences.

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CodePink supports the Communist Party of Cuba and has organized caravans to the island nation.

Treasury Department officials are investigating whether the group violated laws that bar Americans from doing business with the communist regime.

Balling and fellow panelist Michael Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a Cuban American opposed to Cuba’s communist government, viewed the disruption as something more serious than harmless protest.

Balling said such organizations operate as political wrecking crews within the United States.

"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.

She said the groups seek to divide Americans, weaken the country, and depict American freedoms as lies unworthy of defending.

The confrontation arrived as House lawmakers prepared a Tuesday hearing titled "Trojan Horses: Covert Foreign Malign Influence Operations in America."

The hearing will examine how activists, nonprofit organizations, media operations and social media influencers advance the interests of adversarial countries including China, Iran and Cuba.

Twitch streamer Hasan Piker is among the figures facing scrutiny.

Piker joined a CodePink delegation to Cuba earlier this year and posed for a photograph in Havana with CodePink cofounder Jodie Evans, with both drawing Treasury Department scrutiny.

Rep. Bill Huizenga, R-Mich., chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on South and Central Asia, said hostile governments use domestic proxies to spread propaganda.

"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," Huizenga 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," Huizenga added.

Witnesses and lawmakers plan to examine whether foreign governments shape American political discourse through domestic messengers while keeping those governments at a distance.

Fox News Digital has investigated financial and organizational links involving Neville Roy Singham, an American tech tycoon living in Shanghai.

Late last year, Singham appeared at the Golden Tulip Hotel during a conference about the "Global South" and delivered a speech supporting the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping and China’s "new world order."

A Fox News Digital investigation published in five parts examined 223 transactions totaling $591 million across five continents from 2017 through 2025.

The reporting traced funds through multiple organizational layers into a transnational network estimated to include approximately 2,000 organizations.

The analysis documented $278 million flowing from Singham into six central nonprofit organizations beginning in 2017.

They were 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.

Financial records showed $167.5 million going to People’s Support Foundation Ltd., $68.7 million to Justice and Education Fund Inc., and $22.44 million to the People’s Forum.

Tricontinental Ltd. received $16.76 million, CodePink received $1.33 million, and BreakThrough BT Media received $1.098 million.

Those six nonprofits later distributed approximately $163 million to 52 organizations, including themselves, across five geographic regions.

Another layer of 11 groups distributed approximately $150 million into four nonprofits and five geographic regions, including $23 million directed to Africa south of the Sahara.

The organizations and their executives have denied wrongdoing and called the scrutiny an anticommunist "witch hunt."

Singham has not responded to repeated requests for comment.

Back at the Cuba panel, Balling said disruption was the group’s preferred method rather than respectful debate.

"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."

At 6:42 p.m., less than an hour after the event ended at about 6 p.m., CodePink posted a video lasting 1 minute and 35 seconds on X.

"SANCTIONS ARE KILLING THE PEOPLE IN CUBA"

Today, CODEPINK D.C. organizer Olivia DiNucci disrupted a talk featuring the Heritage Foundation's Mike Gonzalez. As the U.S. manufactures a humanitarian crisis in Cuba, Gonzalez and other speakers paint the island as a "threat" to the… pic.twitter.com/YHSNKe9IP5 — CODEPINK (@codepink) September 8, 2026

The group also uploaded it to YouTube and Instagram, then issued a press release listing DiNucci as the "media contact" and offering journalists "unbranded video footage."

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