The House Ways and Means Committee has issued subpoenas to three non-profit groups with alleged links to the Party of Socialism and Liberation (PSL), claiming that the groups received nearly $40 million in funding from multi-millionaire Neville Roy Singham, an American who moved to Shanghai after selling his tech company in 2017.

The compulsory subpoenas were issued July 21 to People’s Forum, based in New York City, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, based in Massachusetts, and BreakThrough News, a media outlet, after all three groups declined to supply documents to the committee voluntarily. The groups were given until August 7 to comply.

According to chair Jason Smith (R-Missouri), the House committee, which has jurisdiction over all tax legislation, is investigating whether existing laws regulating tax-exempt organizations should be tightened. His letters to the three groups declare: “Your responses have failed to include a single responsive document and misrepresented both the scope and purpose of the Committee’s oversight … Accordingly, the Committee is invoking compulsory process to obtain the requested materials.”

The letters cited a Fox News Digital investigation published in March that claimed Singham sent $278 million through a network of non-profits, political groups, and media outlets that “by design, obscure the original source of the contribution.” Both Fox and the House Republicans suggest that it is the Chinese Communist Party that is the actual source of the funds, although Singham clearly has the necessary resources, having sold his Chicago-based software company, ThoughtWorks, for $785 million.

And while Fox is currently leading the media campaign over Singham, its own reports were based heavily on a 2023 investigation by the New York Times, under the provocative headline, “A Global Web of Chinese Propaganda Leads to a U.S. Tech Mogul.”

Singham, now 72, was reportedly a member of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, a Maoist group active in the 1970s, before becoming a successful tech industry capitalist. In 2017, he married Jodie Evans, a co-founder of the antiwar feminist group Code Pink, and a few months later sold his company to a British private equity firm, and moved across the Pacific to Shanghai, where he is now based.

In addition to his funding of various non-profits, Singham also gave $1.3 million to support Code Pink, as well as millions more to a wide variety of antiwar and other left-wing protest groups. No evidence has been presented to show that any of these contributions were illegal.

According to the Fox News account, “The committee asked for records about foreign-linked funding and projects whose finances the groups managed. It also sought contracts tied to foreign people or organizations, communications with Singham about the groups’ finances or operations, contacts with other foreign interests, foreign donors who gave more than $5,000 and grants sent overseas.”

Attorneys for the three groups cited First Amendment protections for freedom of speech, freedom of association and, in the case of BreakThrough News, freedom of the press, but the House committee’s letter brushed these objections aside, claiming that they were investigating sources of funding, not the political views or activities of the groups being subpoenaed.

This legalistic pretense is a masquerade for anticommunist witch-hunting, as the remarks of Smith to Fox News make clear. “The American people deserve to know whether the CCP has exploited America’s tax-exempt sector to advance its agenda… The Ways and Means Committee is acting on two fronts: exposing the networks that exploit our tax laws and advancing legislation to close those loopholes for good.”

Both Fox News and CBS News (now under the control of right-wing pro-Trump billionaire David Ellison) have reported that a federal grand jury in Manhattan is investigating alleged financial crimes linked to Singham and the organizations he supported. The probe was launched by Jay Clayton, the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, who has been nominated by Trump to become the permanent Director of National Intelligence, the top-level coordinator of the vast US intelligence apparatus.

According to CBS, “House Ways and Means and other congressional committees allege Singham’s funding of radical activist groups across the globe as well as inside the U.S. bears the classic hallmarks of Beijing’s broader influence campaigns, which weaponize domestic social causes to sow division in American politics.”

This is the classic “big lie” of right-wing witch-hunters: social conflicts in America are caused by “outside agitators,” not by the objective class divisions in a capitalist society in which a handful of billionaires controls the bulk of the wealth and dominates the political system and the corporate media.

This reaches a level of absurdity with claims that the massive “No Kings” protests, in which millions have taken part in some of the largest demonstrations in US history, were actually generated by funds supplied by Singham and George Soros, the Hungarian-American billionaire who has long been the target of right-wing antisemitic conspiracy theories.

The three non-profits subpoenaed by the House committee are only the initial target of the investigation. Fox News, which is spearheading the witch-hunt, has targeted the Party of Socialism and Liberation (PSL), claiming that the Maoist organization, a split-off from the Workers World Party, overlaps with the non-profits in terms of leadership and program. Fox also identified the ANSWER group, an anti-war coalition headed by the PSL, as a recipient of funds from Singham.

The PSL is campaigning against AI data center development in many parts of the United States. The witch-hunters are suggesting that this campaign is aimed at setting back US efforts to dominate AI and assisting China in its development of effective competitors in this arena. One right-wing outlet, the Bitcoin Policy Institute, estimated that the PSL had opposed AI data center projects worth a combined total of $23.6 billion.

The Trotskyist movement has long and well-documented political differences with the PSL and the groups targeted by subpoenas. Despite these unbridgeable differences, the WSWS condemns the witch-hunt by the Trump administration against the PSL and other groups associated with it. This is an attack on the democratic rights of the working class as a whole, and would set a precedent to be used against any left-wing, socialist or working-class organization.