On Monday, Hasan Piker went live for six hours under a banner that read “FEDS ARE AFTER ME.” He spent most of it cast as the victim of a witch hunt. Then, about thirty-seven minutes in, he did the one thing a victim never does. He named the man who pays for it.

The man is Neville Roy Singham, an American Marxist who lives in Shanghai and praises the Chinese Communist Party. The Treasury subpoena that scared him is not about a streamer’s trip. There is a real legal case here, and Piker just told the country where it leads. The regime on the other end of it is the Castro dictatorship in Cuba. I wrote about it two weeks ago. The regime is closer to falling now than it has been in sixty years.

Who Piker is

Most Americans have never watched a second of Hasan Piker. He is one of the biggest political voices on the American left. He talks politics for hours to young viewers on Twitch, a live-video site. He is the nephew of Cenk Uygur, who co-founded Justice Democrats, the group that helped elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib. Piker campaigns for the left’s candidates and raises money for them. He is no fringe voice; he is a pipeline into the national Democratic Party.

He openly admires communist regimes. He held up Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book on a stream, called it “really, really special,” and read the line praising Mao as “the greatest Marxist-Leninist in our era.” On China’s state television network he called the country “a normal country” and “an example that we should learn from,” while Beijing runs its genocide against the Uyghurs. That is the worldview he carried to Havana.

What he flew in to defend

In March, Piker joined the “Nuestra América Convoy,” a supply run to Cuba organized with CodePink, a far-left group that has defended communist governments for decades. He called it humanitarian aid.

The Cuban government has killed more than nine thousand of its own people by the names the research group Cuba Archive has documented, more than three thousand of them by firing squad. The empty shelves and dead refrigerators Piker filmed are the work of sixty-seven years of communism, not an embargo. The Castros emptied those shelves.

This was not a Red Cross mission. The delegation reportedly stayed at a hotel the State Department lists as run by the Cuban regime, and federal agents are now checking whom the convoy met and what it carried.

The subpoena has a reason

The subpoenas came from the Office of Foreign Assets Control, the Treasury office that enforces sanctions. It sent requests for records to Piker and to CodePink’s co-founder, Medea Benjamin.

But what Democrats forget is this: no one is above the law. And that includes people who are openly helping a totalitarian regime and videoing it. It is a federal crime to send money or goods to Cuba without a license. Cuba is a state sponsor of terrorism, a label Trump restored in 2025. The law behind those sanctions is the Trading with the Enemy Act. A willful violation is a felony. It carries up to twenty years in prison.

A subpoena is not a charge; it is a request for records, and Piker is right that no one has charged him. But the subpoenas exist for a reason. As many as forty Americans are now in the inquiry, part of a federal review of 145 nonprofits. Democrats are calling it intimidation. The better question: why are the party’s biggest stars cozying up to a despotic Cuban regime?

Piker named the paymaster

Piker did the government’s work for them. He said the real target is “Singham and his operation,” running “from PSL to ANSWER Coalition to CodePink — like anything that he has ever financed,” and he called Singham a “funding vehicle for a lot of political movements.” PSL is the Party for Socialism and Liberation, a self-described communist group; the ANSWER Coalition is its protest arm; CodePink is the group that organized his Cuba trip.

Singham sold his tech company for roughly $785 million and moved to Shanghai. He married CodePink’s co-founder. Since 2017 he has put $278 million into six American nonprofits, including a hub for communist organizing in New York and a fund that routes money to secret projects overseas. Those six sit inside a network of some two thousand groups that carry Beijing’s message. Last November, Singham praised the Chinese Communist Party’s “new world order” at a conference in Shanghai.

Piker offered all of that as a defense. It works better as a confession. Federal law says anyone who works for a foreign government here must register as a foreign agent, and members of Congress have asked for years why the Singham groups never have. Tax-exempt charities also cannot run as political machines. Piker just called them political machines, on his own stream.

The humanitarian alibi

The press has a gentler word for all of this. Kotaku called the trip an “aid mission” and the subpoena a move “designed to intimidate and stifle criticism.” CodePink’s Medea Benjamin asked whether “saving the lives of babies is a crime.”

Real aid to Cuba is legal, and Americans send it under license every year. Routing money and supplies through a government Washington calls a sponsor of terror is not charity. Staying in a hotel that government owns is not charity either. Both are the conduct the sanctions law forbids. The way to help a Cuban child is to end the regime that empties the pharmacy, not to fly in and pose beside it.

It is not only streamers

And it is not only streamers. Representative Pramila Jayapal did the louder version on a congressional trip this spring. She called American sanctions “cruel collective punishment,” and she later admitted, “I was in conversations with the ambassadors from Mexico and some other places … trying to figure out how to get oil there.” The White House said Democrats “sip margaritas with terrorists.” Other people reached for the word treason.

The subpoena is a beginning, not an end. Piker named the rest of it on his own stream: Singham, the $278 million, the forty Americans, the 145 nonprofits.

Sending money and goods to a state sponsor of terror is egregious on legal and moral grounds. At best, you can call Piker and his friends useful idiots for another genocidal communist regime. At worst, these radicals are committing treason against the United States.

Piker says the feds are after him. They are after the network. On Monday, for six hours, he handed them the map. The feds should follow it.