House Ways and Means Committee Chair Jason Smith, R-Mo., speaks with a reporter on Capitol Hill on July 21, 2026.
Photo: Francis Chung/Politico via AP Images
The House Ways
and Means Committee last week carried out an attack on journalism that hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves. The committee
subpoenaed
BreakThrough News, a left-wing outlet with deep ties to the Party for Socialism and Liberation that is highly critical of the United States and Israel, along with two other nonprofits with similar ideologies, The People’s Forum and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
The subpoena deserves the same scrutiny as those
issued to New York Times reporters
over their reporting on security issues with President Donald Trump’s Qatari jet, which, after significant pushback in the courts of law and public opinion, the government
withdrew
Thursday — the same day BreakThrough announced its receipt of the legal orders.
Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, an attorney for BreakThrough, called the committee “a modern day HUAC,” the McCarthy-era committee on so-called “un-American” activities. Communists aren’t the only ones who should be concerned. As Chip Gibbons, policy director at Defending Rights & Dissent, put it: “Attacks on independent, alternative, or radical media have troubling history. It is always the I.F. Stones or the WikiLeaks who are first on the firing line.”
The Ways and Means Committee is claiming its investigation is a tax-related probe into more than $39 million that flowed from Neville Roy Singham, a U.S. citizen and tech financier based in Shanghai, to the groups, which it claims advance Chinese Communist Party-aligned interests. But we’ve seen that playbook before: Around the globe, financial probes have been used as pretexts to stifle journalism and dissent, and there’s every indication that this is the latest example.
BreakThrough News has been criticized for favorable coverage of China and other U.S. adversaries, which it inde
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