US Lawmakers Demand IRS Crack Down on CCP-Linked Nonprofits, Citing New York Networks Connected to Foreign Influence Cases

The House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party and the Ways and Means Committee have jointly demanded a Treasury and IRS briefing by April 22.

Left: Government exhibit showing Linda Sun with Beijing-tied community leader John Chan. Right: Image from The New York Times profile of John Chan, showing Chan with former New York Mayor Eric Adams and numerous American politicians at a similar community event.

WASHINGTON — Today two of the most powerful committees in Washington have jointly demanded that the Internal Revenue Service and the Treasury Department take immediate enforcement action against Chinese Communist Party-linked organizations operating inside America’s tax-exempt sector — citing, among other evidence, the same New York diaspora networks that featured prominently in the high-profile foreign influence prosecution of former New York State government aide Linda Sun, and in investigative reporting by The Bureau and the New York Times into Chinese consulate influence over New York City elections.

The demand also takes direct aim at a Chinese Communist Party-linked American technology mogul named Neville Roy Singham, who now lives in Shanghai and whom congressional investigators have linked to a web of American tax-exempt organizations including The People’s Forum, BreakThrough News, and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

Committees in both chambers have alleged these media platforms serve as vehicles for CCP-aligned propaganda, domestic political disruption, and what the letter’s authors describe as a coordinated campaign to sow chaos and division inside the United States. Singham’s wife is a co-founder of CodePink, the anti-war activist organization.

Together, the network the letter describes spans from street-level Marxist cultural agitation and pro-Beijing campus activism to the formal United Front diaspora association infrastructure Beijing reportedly uses to shape electoral outcomes in Chinese-American communities.

The letter casts these media and electoral channels as distinct but complementary pieces of the same broader influence operation — both sheltered under American tax-exempt status, and both, the chairmen argue, exploiting an enforcement vacuum that has persisted for years.

The joint letter was signed by House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party Chairman John Moolenaar and House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith, addressed to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Internal Revenue Service chief executive Frank Bisignano. It demands a formal briefing no later than April 22 on steps the agencies are taking to address what the chairmen call a direct threat to American democratic institutions.

This represents the most direct congressional demand to date for executive branch enforcement action against the United Front organizational infrastructure — the same apparatus that federal prosecutors described in the Linda Sun foreign influence case and that the New York Times documented in its August 2025 investigation into Chinese consulate influence over New York City elections.

The Chinese Communist Party, the two lawmakers write, is using United Front organizations, proxies, and intermediaries — many of them holding tax-exempt status under Section 501(c) of the Internal Revenue Code — to engage in political activity that manipulates American democratic institutions and advances CCP interests.

The chairmen ground their demand in an evidentiary record drawing on congressional investigations, Department of Justice prosecutions, and major investigative journalism — including the New York Times’ August 2025 investigation, which found at least 53 tax-exempt organizations that had endorsed or raised money for political candidates in likely violation of federal rules against political campaign intervention, with at least 19 in clear violation of the prohibition.

As a nonprofit law professor told the Times: “That’s totally out of bounds. That’s a clear violation of the limits that Congress has put on their tax-exempt status.”

At the structural level, the letter explains the institutional architecture Beijing uses. Overseas hometown associations — originally intended to give Chinese immigrants a venue for community connection — have been co-opted into the United Front strategy. They are coordinated through the All-China Federation of Returned Chinese, which is itself overseen by the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, the body the Central Intelligence Agency identifies as the institutional apex of China’s overseas influence apparatus.

The letter explicitly flags that the United Front also serves as cover for operations by China’s Ministry of Public Security and Ministry of State Security — the precise agencies whose officers appeared in the Linda Sun trial and whose documented presence in New York diaspora networks The Bureau has been investigating.

The letter also points specifically to the Fujian community as a focal point of concern — a dimension that carries particular resonance given the record of police and intelligence investigations in Canada.

Canadian immigration intelligence documents cited in The Bureau‘s prior reporting traced the roots of Chinese state-sponsored transnational crime networks directly to Fujian Province, where Communist Party officials and Triad organizations operated in deliberate partnership to manage smuggling networks as far back as the early 1990s.

The Bureau‘s reporting has shown that the legacy of those Fujian and Triad snakehead operations — which funneled economic migrants into cities including Vancouver, Toronto, New York, and San Francisco — produced diaspora populations that remain subject to Chinese secret police surveillance, organized crime network pressure, and, as the congressional letter now makes plain, documented electoral interference channels running through those same communities. The letter’s focus on Fujian-linked associations in New York in 2026 suggests those roots have proved durable.

The chairmen cite the prosecution of a New York resident who pleaded guilty to operating a secret Chinese government police station in lower Manhattan — networks that, according to The Bureau‘s reporting, involved Fujian community associations. They cite the Linda Sun prosecution — the case of a former senior aide to Governors Andrew Cuomo and Kathy Hochul who was charged with acting as an undisclosed agent of the Chinese Communist Party, using her position to block Taiwanese officials, shape state policy on issues Beijing cared about, and steer tens of millions of dollars in pandemic procurement contracts to Chinese vendors with undisclosed personal connections. They cite a political operative sentenced to four years for acting as a covert Chinese government agent.

And they cite, at length, the New York Times’ finding that hometown associations in New York have systematically foiled the political careers of candidates perceived as unfriendly to Beijing while backing those aligned with CCP interests.

One passage in the letter describes a particularly egregious episode: a congressional candidate in New York whose involvement in the Tiananmen student protests made him a target of Chinese government hostility was subjected to threats from Chinese government agents seeking to sabotage his campaign — threats documented in a federal indictment charging an alleged Ministry of State Security employee in absentia — while community organizations that would normally provide candidates a platform were threatened, coerced, or co-opted by the Chinese consulate to deny him one. Local leaders who attended meetings with foreign figures Beijing opposed were censored by hometown associations. Association leaders, the letter adds, explicitly endorsed rival candidates for office, in documented violation of their tax-exempt obligations.

The pattern — consulate pressure, diaspora organization co-optation, candidate targeting, and political endorsements in violation of nonprofit law — is the same pattern the Linda Sun trial placed in evidence, the same pattern the New York Times documented in its investigation, and the same pattern The Bureau has been tracing in its ongoing reporting on New York’s Chinese-American political networks.

Alongside the diaspora network concern, the letter situates the Moolenaar-Smith demand within a years-long congressional investigation into the Singham network. Singham, a former American technology executive now based in Shanghai with documented ties to the CCP, has reportedly directed more than $100 million through entities including The People’s Forum, BreakThrough News, and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research — organizations Ways and Means has described as amplifying CCP propaganda, inciting domestic unrest, and operating in systematic violation of their tax-exempt status.

The People’s Forum has hosted events and courses promoting Communist Party propaganda, publicly supported Hamas’ October 7 terrorist attack against Israel, and organized disruptive campus occupations, according to the committee’s findings. BreakThrough News and Tricontinental have been described by the committee as part of the same coordinated network, mixing progressive advocacy with messaging that mirrors CCP priorities on issues ranging from Taiwan to American domestic politics.

As the letter notes, the IRS declined to comment on congressional findings in this area, citing statutory restrictions on disclosure of taxpayer information. New York’s state tax agency admitted it lacked the resources to identify violations. The result, the chairmen argue, is a documented enforcement vacuum that Beijing has exploited with considerable sophistication and apparent impunity.

The April 22 briefing deadline is a formal congressional oversight demand from the chairmen of two of the most powerful committees in the House, addressed jointly to the Treasury Secretary and the IRS chief executive, in an administration that has demonstrated considerably greater appetite for confronting Chinese influence operations than its predecessor.

For the diaspora association network specifically, IRS scrutiny would raise questions about the status of organizations that have, by the congressional record’s own account, made explicit candidate endorsements, hosted fundraisers for political campaigns, and coordinated with foreign consulate officials — all in direct violation of the conditions attached to their tax-exempt status. Whether that scrutiny extends to specific organizations documented in The Bureau‘s ongoing investigation into New York’s Chinese-American political networks is not addressed in any public record. The April 22 briefing may begin to answer that question — and ultimately surface information that was never before the jury in the Linda Sun case, which ended in a mistrial on December 22, 2025 after jurors deadlocked on all 19 counts, and is tentatively scheduled for retrial on January 18, 2027, before Judge Brian Cogan in the Eastern District of New York. Sun and her husband Chris Hu deny all allegations.