Investigation: ActBlue Got Foreign Cash Then Punished Whistleblower

A new congressional report pulls back the curtain on the Democratic fundraising behemoth ActBlue, revealing the company may have recklessly laundered foreign money into American elections.

ActBlue CEO Regina Wallace-Jones may have perjured herself when she told Congress the platform is secure. When attorneys voiced concerns that the company may have broken the law, Wallace-Jones and others in ActBlue leadership simply retaliated against them, alleges the Wednesday interim staff report from the House Administration Committee, House Judiciary Committee and House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

A running tally on the ActBlue website shows the liberal money machine has raised nearly $20 billion as of Thursday. How much of that enormous tranche originated abroad remains a complete mystery, the latest evidence suggests.

Foreign actors could easily bypass the company’s loophole-laden verification process, the committees allege.

When an ActBlue contributor lists an address outside of the U.S., a popup window asks for a passport number. But donors need not have a valid passport, the committee’s investigation reveals, because a foreign donor can simply come up with a random number with the correct number of digits.

Over the summer, the committee received a log of internal reviews of risky donations for a two-year period, 2022 through 2024. ActBlue supervisors instructed employees to accept contributions from a donor with a Hong Kong IP address and another donor with “a few foreign IPs” because “they are all consistently in the same place,” the internal records show.

ActBlue supervisors sometimes instructed fraud prevention analysts to “give the donor the benefit of the doubt” and accept every donation, no matter how risky, the committee says.

Whether donors using Apple Pay, PayPal or Venmo had to supply a passport number at all is not clear.

In a statement, ActBlue characterized the report as a Republican witch hunt meant to hurt the Democratic Party before the midterm elections.