All France News
Seth Stern is the director of advocacy for Freedom of the Press Foundation.
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.
“ The First Amendment was specifically written to protect journalism that the government does not approve of.”
BreakThrough’s editor-in-chief, Ben Becker, had a common-sense observation: “The First Amendment was specifically written to protect journalism that the government does not approve of. Journalism approved by the government wouldn’t need protection,” he said. “That’s why so many of the country’s decisive free speech cases involved the abolitionist press, the radical labor press and the antiwar press. … But history looks back on these episodes for what they were — shameful violations of free speech — and that’s the same thing that’s happening here.”
My Freedom of the Press Foundation colleague Adam Rose, who also serves as press rights chair of the Los Angeles Press Club, found that last part particularly infuriating (PSL and its leadership have not been charged with any offenses relating to violence in LA). The government, Rose said, has “failed to investigate the documented wholesale violence by federal agents against press and protesters” in LA. “Maybe instead of a foreign state, our elected representatives should be more concerned about our own state violence against innocent civilians in our local streets.”
There’s another problem with the probe of BreakThrough. Putting aside the subpoenas’ flimsy evidentiary backing, House subpoenas must carry a legislative purpose. Why would the committee need a fishing expedition into the finances of a few leftist nonprofits to decide whether legislative reforms are necessary? The committee’s letter claims to have already spotted the gap in nonprofit tax law they contend Singham is exploiting, and it cites plenty of public reporting on his network, so it’s unclear what other information its members need that could conceivably justify congressional action as extreme as subpoenaing news outlets. If the best argument they can come up with for their contemplated legislation is that three obscure organizations were funded by an American citizen living abroad, maybe they should find other fish to fry.
As Breakthrough’s chief correspondent Rania Khalek recently said, “I think this is really just about trying to bury us in legal proceedings until we’ve basically run out of money or stop reporting out of intimidation.
BreakThrough is far from the first victim of this censorial playbook. Rodrigo Duterte’s government in the Philippines, for example, filed a series of tax evasion cases against Rappler, the investigative outlet led by journalist Maria Ressa, due to its alleged acceptance of foreign investments (Ressa is a former board member of The Intercept). Advocates described the cases as part of a broader legal campaign designed to wear the outlet down. It took years and a change of administration before courts acquitted Ressa and Rappler. Authorities in Azerbaijan have also repeatedly brought pretextual financial charges including tax evasion against investigative journalism they sought to suppress.
There are also examples closer to home — not just from Red Scares decades ago, but in present-day Florida. A 2025 state law restricts nonprofits from accepting funds from broadly defined “foreign sources of concern” tied to countries like China, Russia, Cuba, and Iran, while a related “Honest Services Registry” asks charities to affirm they’re free of such foreign influence. A separate domestic terrorism law lets state officials designate organizations as terrorist groups — organizations like the Muslim civil rights group CAIR and the amorphous non-entity the government calls “antifa” have already received the designation.
Florida First Amendment Foundation executive director Bobby Block explained the agenda in an email: “Make people wonder whether joining an organization, donating to a cause, attending a protest or expressing an unpopular viewpoint could put them under a government microscope, and some will simply decide to remain silent. That’s the chilling effect the First Amendment is supposed to protect against.”
Combined with the administration’s crackdown on purported domestic terror outlined by National Security Presidential Memorandum 7; Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s bizarre memorandum claiming a Cuban conspiracy to spread communism stateside; and the countless other suppression of dissent we’ve seen from Trump allies, all of them predictably targeting speakers whose politics differ from the president’s — it’s not hard to spot the endgame.
BreakThrough isn’t the only news outlet recently swept into this broader crackdown. Earlier this month, U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents detained Grayzone journalist Max Blumenthal and seized two smartphones after he returned from reporting in Iran. Like BreakThrough, Grayzone is highly critical of U.S. and Israeli foreign policy, and its detractors accuse it of being soft on U.S. adversaries. It’s the kind of outlet governments know they can harass without nearly the blowback that comes with subpoenaing the New York Times.
After Blumenthal sued, authorities let him pick up his phones, but he remains concerned about whether their content was searched or copied (Blumenthal said officers asked him to unlock his phones and when he refused, they told him they’d “hook them up to machines,” presumably to extract their contents. Blumenthal, of course, is far from the only reporter who has reported from Iran or who visited the country to cover Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s state funeral. But, to the best of our knowledge, he’s the only one who has had his phones searched and seized.
Gibbons is right that attacks on press freedom historically start on the edges. Trump has arguably been an aberration, though. Although he certainly draws inspiration from outliers, taking legal theories that were laughed at the court on the local level and turning them into federal policy, his own strategy is generally to start big.
Likely because he still mentally resides in a skyscraper in 1980s Manhattan, Trump is far more focused on outlets like the Times than on the independent press. He files SLAPP suits against mainstream journalists at a pace that would land anyone else on a restricted filers list; his Federal Communications Commission continues threatening the licenses of broadcasters who don’t kiss the ring emphatically enough for his liking; his Pentagon tried to extract loyalty pledges from the country’s most prominent outlets; and his Justice Department and FBI can’t seem to stop raiding and subpoenaing journalists no matter what the judiciary has to say.
These efforts have certainly had an incalculable chilling effect on the press, but they’ve largely fizzled in court. The prospect that the administration may have caught on to that pattern and shifted its focus to outlets with less mainstream support, less money, and fewer lawyers on retainer is an alarming one.
As Gibbons put it, “Those who are serious about press freedom cannot be selective in their solidarity.”
