‘Trojan horses’ in America: Congress probes influence networks tied to China, Iran and Cuba

Last Tuesday, at the corner of Church Street and 16th Street NW, blocks from the White House, Christine Balling, a former advisor to U.S.

Special Operations Command South, led a panel discussion on the national security threat that communist-run Cuba poses to the U.S.

Suddenly, a fresh-faced former college basketball star, Olivia DiNucci, stood up to steal the stage at the Institute of World Politics, yelling as she clutched a hand-painted banner: "SANCTIONS KILL IN CUBA." "There is global solidarity with Gaza and Cuba and ICE here," DiNucci shouted breathlessly, as security officials grabbed her banner and pushed her out a side door as she kept yelling, "because the liberation of our people is rooted in our neighbors!" In small print, the banner had DiNucci's organizational and ideological affiliation: "CODEPINK." DiNucci is a D.C.-based political organizer with CodePink, a left-wing political agitation group, spending her days and evenings as a professional protester and a regular gadfly, disrupting dinners, hearings and conferences as a sidekick to CodePink co-founder Susan Medea Benjamin.

Their group supports the Communist Party of Cuba and has led caravans to the island nation, as Treasury Department officials investigate whether they violated any laws barring Americans from doing business with the communist regime.

For Balling and her co-panelist, Michael Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a Cuban American firmly opposed to the communist government of Cuba, DiNucci's political theater wasn't the benign act of an "anti-war" group, as CodePink describes itself.

"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.