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"Dead To Rights": Internal ActBlue Records Show Foreign-Flagged Donations Waved Through, Whistleblower Messages Deleted

Tyler Durden's Photo
by Tyler Durden
Authored...

For years, the left has lectured Americans about the dangers of "foreign interference" and dark money in our elections. But a sweeping congressional investigation has laid bare a vast Democratic fundraising apparatus that paved the way for just that: ActBlue, the billion-dollar financial engine of the Democratic Party, created a mechanism that encouraged illicit foreign cash - and then, investigators say, covered it up. Read on.

On Wednesday, House investigators released "Part III" of their bombshell investigation into ActBlue's fundraising practices. The findings outline a staggering pattern of willful blindness, internal censorship, and a frantic race by executives to plead the Fifth.

Here is how the Democrats' top fundraising platform built a system that welcomed very questionable cash, and how their own staff tried to bury the evidence.

Step 1: The "Smurfing" Machine

The scandal was officially brought to light in April 2025, when the House GOP released Part I of its staff report. Lawmakers detailed a structural nightmare: ActBlue had intentionally bypassed standard banking security measures, such as requiring CVV verification codes for credit card donations.

That gap is what made "smurfing" plausible - a money-laundering technique in which a large, illegal contribution is chopped into thousands of small donations, each attributed to a real person who, allegedly, never made it. The prepaid cards obscure where the money came from; the borrowed names make it look like a stream of legal small-dollar gifts from ordinary Americans. The donations themselves aren't hidden - as a conduit, ActBlue itemizes every one in its FEC filings regardless of size, which is how the donor lists cited below were compiled. The question is whether anyone at ActBlue was checking whose names were being used.

The allegation itself predates the House probe. It surfaced in March 2023, when James O'Keefe's O'Keefe Media Group - working from FEC-record analysis compiled by Peter Bernegger's Election Watch - published videos of elderly donors listed in federal filings for thousands of small ActBlue contributions far beyond anything they said they'd given. Sen. Ron Johnson wrote the FEC in April 2023; Chairman Steil's committee ran its own analysis of FEC records and in September 2024 referred its findings to five state attorneys general, citing anomalous donor profiles consistent with unwitting "straw donors"; President Trump's April 2025 memorandum directed DOJ to investigate "straw" and "dummy" donations. ActBlue calls the inquiry politically motivated. The House reports don't settle it. What they document is that ActBlue's own records show at least 22 significant fraud campaigns, account takeovers used to make straw donations that appeared to come from regular donors, and 237 prepaid-card donations from foreign IP addresses in a single month before the 2024 election - and that when investigators asked former Associate General Counsel Aaron Ting under oath whether smurfing is prevalent on ActBlue, he took the Fifth.

Step 2: The Cover-Up and the Fifth Amendment

When ActBlue's own legal and compliance teams realized the potential scale of illicit foreign donations flowing through the platform, panic set in. But instead of correcting the record with Congress, as its own lawyers advised, the execs allegedly moved to suppress the findings, as outlined in the committee's Part II report.

Internal records show what happened to the last lawyer who escalated the foreign-donation problem. After the 2024 election, ActBlue's outside counsel had warned the company in two memoranda that its screening of overseas contributions lacked the rigor it had described to Congress, and that its November 2023 letter to Chairman Steil may have been false or misleading. On February 25, 2025 - his first full day running the legal department - legal counsel Zain Ahmad put those memoranda in front of ActBlue's board of directors and executive team.

The silencing began the next day. He was locked out of his email and Google Drive, against ActBlue's own leave policy. When he objected in a 277-person IT channel - calling it retaliation and citing the company's whistleblower and anti-retaliation policies - IT director Hanna Bonin deleted the messages as fast as he posted them: his request to restore access, his policy citations, the policies themselves, and finally his plea to "stop deleting my requests," which vanished five seconds after it went up. Six deletions in one night. An HR staffer told the chief people officer it "look[ed] like blatant retaliation." When his email came back the next day, HR was discussing how to "key in on him" using the company's security tools.

The warnings, and leadership's response to them, sparked a mass exodus. Outside counsel, led by former Biden White House Counsel Dana Remus, warned that ActBlue's violations could be alleged to be "knowing and willful" and advised the CEO to hire her own lawyer. Instead, the CEO fired the law firm, and every member of ActBlue's legal and compliance team was gone within four months. When congressional investigators subpoenaed the people who knew, five current and former employees - including Ahmad, former General Counsel Darrin Hurwitz, and Ting - invoked their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination a staggering 146 times, declining to say even when they had worked at the company. CEO Regina Wallace-Jones did the same on camera in June; co-founder Matt DeBergalis and board chair Kimberly Peeler-Allen followed in August and September.

Step 3: The Smoking Gun

Released just weeks ahead of the 2026 midterms, Part III of the report brings it home. ActBlue wasn't just a victim of a cyber vulnerability - they were actively instructing their employees to ignore it.

According to internal policy records, ActBlue's supposed "passport verification" process to stop foreign donors was a complete sham. The platform admitted behind closed doors that it never checked government databases and "merely store[d] the information," validating nothing more than whether a user typed in the correct character count.

Worse, internal logs show fraud analysts were routinely pressured to approve flagged foreign contributions - sometimes over a pile of red flags, sometimes on the strength of a social media profile:

  • A donor with an IP/billing mismatch, a suspicious IP provider, a foreign credit card, an odd email domain, and a browser fingerprint linked to other rejected accounts was accepted because staff "can't say for sure that this is fraud."
  • In one instance, a donor whose data pointed entirely to Canada despite entering a Missouri billing address was approved simply because "Twitter seems to confirm that they are a real person".
  • In another case, a foreign-flagged donor was waved through because the analyst noted they had a LinkedIn profile.
  • Supervisors brushed aside red flags from adversarial regions, clearing transactions where the donor had an IP address originating in Hong Kong.

ActBlue's answer, delivered Wednesday evening by press release, is a third-party "forensic review" of its 2023 data that it says proves the CEO told Congress the truth - 99.99% of that year's contribution dollars came from donors who gave a U.S. address or a passport number. Its line to reporters: "There's nothing to see here."

And of course, they only noted whether a contribution arrived with a U.S. address or a passport number (zero verification of either), not whether the donor was legally eligible to give, and none of its published findings reach past 2023.

"Got Them Dead to Rights"

Tech investor Joe Lonsdale's reaction summed up the mood on the right - "Wow. Got them dead to rights" - adding that if a conservative platform were caught doing this, it would lead the legacy press for weeks.

So now that we know all this, will federal law enforcement finally hold ActBlue accountable, or will the two-tiered system of justice give them another pass?

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