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.

“There’s nothing to see here,” ActBlue said in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation. “After we released findings of a third-party forensic analysis that completely undermined a central claim that they have made against ActBlue, Republicans are refusing to move on. Instead, they are orchestrating another political stunt before rushing out of town weeks early to go campaign.”

“This coordinated campaign against ActBlue isn’t about the facts, or legislating, it’s about Republicans’ efforts to silence organizations they believe threaten their agenda,” a spokesperson for the platform added.

The House Administration Committee launched its investigation in October 2023 following reports that ActBlue does not ask that a donor to the platform supply a card verification value (CVV). The committee first flagged that the platform could be utilized as a conduit for foreign money laundering in October 2024.

By February 2025, the company faced an internal revolt, internal Slack messages obtained by congressional investigators reveal. Following the departure of most of the company’s legal team, its last remaining in-house attorney said that he faced illegal retaliation. ActBlue Director of IT Hanna Bonin simply deleted his messages.

At the time, ActBlue had also retained white-shoe law firm Covington & Burling. But the platform terminated the firm the very next month — March 2025 — after its outside counsel too expressed concerns about lawbreaking.

When the New York Times published an investigation into the tumult this April, ActBlue once again went on the warpath against its own attorneys, accusing Covington & Burling of “counsel that bordered on malpractice.” The law firm forcefully denied the accusation.

In June, the committee compelled Wallace-Jones to testify. She stonewalled the lawmakers, repeatedly invoking her Fifth Amendment rights.

The company has lately retained new counsel with the law firm WilmerHale, which conducted its own analysis of ActBlue’s donor verification process that ActBlue says exculpates the company. WilmerHale attorneys briefed the committee Friday, The Washington Post reported.

A letter prepared by the firm to the committee describes foreign donations as “vanishingly rare,” saying that in 2023 ActBlue collected a passport number at the time of contribution for 93% of foreign-address contribution dollars.

The report does not appear to dispute the committee’s claim that passport numbers were never actually checked against a government database.

In a March 2025 executive order, the Trump White House sought to cut off the firm from federal contracts and jobs, alleging the firm engages in a racially discriminatory diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policy and pro bono liberal advocacy. The firm hired the late FBI Director Robert S. Mueller, the special prosecutor on the Russiagate investigation, in addition to two of Mueller’s aides.

Central to former attorneys’ concerns about perjury is a 2023 letter that Wallace-Jones addressed to the committee. It claimed that ActBlue has a multilayered and rigorous process that “roots out” potential foreign contributions.

“Only donations with passport information are processed,” the letter reads.

The committee later discovered through subpoenaed records that the only validation of these numbers was ensuring they had the correct number of digits.

Covington & Burling had flagged that the steps described in the letter for vetting foreign donations were not always followed, the Times reported.