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Back in April, The New York Times reported that lawyers for ActBlue, the leading Democrat fundraising platform, “may have misled Congress on vetting foreign donations.”
Now the scandal has gotten even deeper, with House Republicans alleging even more serious fraud and wrongdoing. But with Election Day right around the corner, the liberal media has suddenly gone mute on this bombshell story implicating scores of Democrat politicians and campaigns.
ActBlue is the dominant platform used for Democrat small-dollar fundraising – the liberal counterpart to WinRed. It has processed some $19 billion in contributions since 2004, with candidates and groups raising nearly $1.8 billion from 52 million individual contributions through ActBlue in 2025 alone.
In this campaign cycle, high-profile Democrats including Jon Ossoff, Abdul El-Sayed, James Talarico, Roy Cooper, Mary Peltola, and Josh Turek have all used ActBlue. Democrat House and Senate leaders, as well as countless congressional candidates, also use the platform.
Foreign nationals are prohibited from making contributions in connection with federal, state, or local U.S. elections, and campaigns may not knowingly accept such contributions. Americans living abroad, including military personnel, diplomats, and students, can donate. There are also comprehensive campaign finance laws requiring platforms like ActBlue to take steps to identify and prevent fraud, such as foreign entities or individuals making donations in the name of U.S. citizens.
According to a new joint report from the House Judiciary, Administration, and Oversight committees, however, ActBlue did not investigate warning signs seriously enough to distinguish lawful American donors from prohibited foreign contributors.
From California to Minnesota to Washington DC, Democrats are engaging in and covering up FRAUD. Their most recent scandal? ALLOWING fraudulent donations to their fundraising platforms to help their party win elections! Despite their attempts to stop us, House Republicans will Show more
The report says ActBlue repeatedly instructed fraud-prevention analysts to “give the donor the benefit of the doubt,” even when donations had several red flags.
In one example cited by investigators, a donor had an IP and billing address mismatch, a foreign credit card, an unusual email domain, and browser fingerprint connections to rejected users. Yet an ActBlue employee allegedly instructed analysts to accept the contribution because ActBlue could not say with certainty that it was fraudulent.
That is a remarkably low standard for an organization handling money destined for American political campaigns. It is also perhaps why, as the Times reported this spring, several top ActBlue officials resigned in quick succession following “legal warnings about potentially misleading Congress over vetting foreign donations.”
The House report also cites an employee noting “an odd pattern of small donations” to Kamala Harris’s campaign using prepaid cards. Another employee reportedly deemed the donations “good to accept.”
One of the most shocking vulnerabilities is ActBlue’s passport verification procedure.
In a 2023 letter to Congress, ActBlue said that people making contributions from foreign addresses were required to provide a U.S. passport number. But House investigators say the supposed verification process merely checked whether the number entered had the appropriate number of characters – not whether it belonged to a valid U.S. passport holder. The report said ActBlue’s procedure was an “ineffective security method that does not actually require a valid U.S. passport number.”
MORE FRAUD AT ACTBLUE: New information produced to @JudiciaryGOP, @HouseAdmin, and @GOPOversight shows just how unserious ActBlue’s fraud-prevention practices are. Accepting foreign donations in U.S. elections is ILLEGAL. ActBlue knows this, but repeatedly instructed its Show more
A Texas lawsuit, citing ActBlue’s outside legal memoranda, also alleges that donors using Apple Pay, PayPal, or Venmo were not asked for passport information.
According to the House committees’ Part II report, ActBlue’s outside counsel, Covington & Burling, warned in 2025 that the organization could be alleged to have accepted illegal contributions from foreign nationals. The documents the committees later obtained show what happened inside the company.
By March 2025, every member of ActBlue’s legal and compliance team had resigned, been fired, or gone on extended leave. Investigators tie that mass exodus to the platform’s failure to stop illegal foreign donations, CEO Regina Wallace-Jones’s statements to Congress, and what the report calls the “knowing and willful” acceptance of illegal foreign contributions — and the cover-up that followed.
Interim ActBlue general counsel Aaron Ting resigned in that wave. In his resignation letter, Ting wrote that leadership was not fully committed to presenting to the board concerns about the legality of the platform’s past overseas donation screening and the accuracy of its prior representations to Congress.
Former legal counsel Zain Ahmad also raised concerns about misconduct and, investigators say, faced retaliation. ActBlue has asserted attorney-client privilege over Ting’s resignation letter, Ahmad’s internal message, and 420 additional documents.
In an unbiased and objective media ecosystem, this story would be one of the biggest scandals of the past several years. There appears to be substantial evidence that the largest small-dollar fundraising platform for one of the two major political parties in the country engaged in a systemic and intentional effort to lower guardrails to foreign money influencing American elections. At the very least, it’s worth further investigation and coverage.
But as the Media Research Center reported, as of September 23, the story had received zero seconds of coverage from ABC, CBS, and NBC. Fox News was the only major network to cover it in any capacity.
The reason for this coordinated blackout is obvious: Election Day is only a few weeks away, and the corporate media can’t allow anything to tarnish Democrats’ image as voters cast their ballots.
But the questions raised by this investigation won’t disappear when the polls close. Neither will the questions about why the nation’s biggest news networks gave the allegations so little attention when voters had the most reason to hear about them. Ultimately, their silence ironically may be what thrusts this story into the mainstream.
About the author
Sarah Katherine Sisk
Contributing Writer
@SKSisk76All articles by Sarah Katherine Sisk →
Expertise
- • Economics
Credentials
- • Hillsdale College alumna; pursuing a master’s in economics at George Mason University
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