ActBlue has been, for much better or for much worse, a change agent in the landscape of American politics. It turns out it may have accomplished that by allowing non-Americans to interfere with our elections via direct donations to Democratic candidates — something that is, in case you’re unfamiliar with federal law, very, very illegal.
But now that legislators and law enforcement have turned their attention to whether or not ActBlue cared whether people were using its platform to break the law, employees for the donation platform are staying mum, invoking the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination no less than 146 times when testifying before the House Judiciary Committee.
In a news release Monday about their investigation into the fundraising platform, the Judiciary Committee described the “mass exodus of the Democrat fundraising platform’s legal and compliance teams in the months following the 2024 election” and how “ActBlue made its fraud-prevention rules ‘more lenient’ twice in 2024 — even though there is extensive fraud on the platform, including from foreign sources.”
The platform, which was founded in 2004, is nominally a political action committee. In reality, it’s basically like PayPal for campaign donations — and it’s been wildly successful. According to CNN, in a little over 20 years, it had raised $16 billion for Democratic candidates. While Republicans have caught up in terms of online campaign infrastructure, ActBlue’s early success in the field of small online donations gave Democrats a big boost for a long while.
However, starting in the aftermath of the 2024 election, questions began to be raised about ActBlue’s compliance with basic campaign finance laws. Then, 142 individuals who were ex-employees, campaign staff, consultants, and others close to or who had studied the platform signed a letter in which they accused ActBlue of “tactics [that] are exploiting donors, harming the Democratic Party’s brand, and causing damage to the progressive fundraising ecosystem.”
That same day, Campaigns & Elections reported, House Republicans looked into “foreign interference” in elections, including with ActBlue. GOP Rep. Bryan Steil of Wisconsin, who chairs the Committee on House Administration, had already sent a letter to ActBlue asking for info on their “donor verification policies and the potential for foreign actors, primarily from Iran, Russia, Venezuela, and China, to use ActBlue to launder illicit money into U.S. political campaigns.”
TL;DR, we’ve gotten to the point where ActBlue’s safeguards against this sort of thing, or absolute lack thereof, are or were nonexistent. Earlier this month, The New York Times reported that in April of 2025, a law firm representing the platform “concluded that ActBlue’s chief executive had given a potentially misleading response to congressional Republican investigators in a 2023 letter explaining how the organization vetted donations to ensure that they were not illegally coming from foreign citizens” and that “some of the steps” an ActBlue executive said were in place to prevent this from happening “were not always followed.”
“The memos instigated a meltdown at the highest levels of ActBlue, one of the Democratic Party’s most vital financial organs,” the Times reported.
“A series of top officials resigned in quick succession. The New York Times revealed those departures last year, but a key cause of the tumult at ActBlue — the legal warnings about potentially misleading Congress over vetting foreign donations — is being reported here for the first time.”
And now we have the report from House Judiciary, which notes that “five current or former employees at ActBlue who appeared for depositions all invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self incrimination during questioning — for a total of 146 times.”
Now, anyone who’s ever spent a sick day with nothing to do but watch “Law & Order” repeats on USA will attest to the fact that yes, invoking the Fifth Amendment is not, in and of itself, incriminating. In conjunction with virtually every other piece of reporting on the matter and the House Judiciary report itself, the optics aren’t spectacular, let’s just put it that way.
Some great pull-quotes from the 119-page report:
- “Put simply: every member of ActBlue’s legal and compliance team appears to have left the platform after the 2024 election because of its ‘knowing and willful’ acceptance of illegal foreign contributions, and the subsequent cover-up.”
- “Documents produced pursuant to the Committees’ subpoenas show the collapse of ActBlue’s legal and compliance team in the months after the 2024 election. By March 2025, every member of ActBlue’s legal and compliance team resigned, was fired, or went on extended leave from the platform.”
- “The Committees conducted five depositions with key ActBlue fraud-prevention and legal personnel to obtain more information about the fraud-prevention failures detailed in the Committees’ first report and the cover-up detailed here. The employees invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination in response to every single one of the Committees’ substantive questions — 146 times in total.”
- “ActBlue took every step to prevent Congress from finding out about this: [former CEO Regina] Wallace-Jones appears to have made false statements to Congress, [and] ActBlue appears to have withheld documents responsive to a congressional subpoena …”
- “[I]nternal trainings directed ActBlue’s fraud-prevention team to ‘look for reasons to accept contributions’ rather than examine them closely for indicators of fraud — as
required by federal regulation. ActBlue took this lax approach to fraud prevention even though it has detected at least 22 significant fraud campaigns on the platform in recent years, including several from foreign sources.”
Well, that’s even worse optics, particularly as the fundraising platform of choice for the party that crows about “foreign interference in elections” so long as it relies on ludicrous assertions about a non-existent tape of Donald Trump and some ladies of the world’s oldest profession performing certain natural processes on a Muscovite mattress.
When it comes to actual foreign interference, by the by, that Fifth Amendment-invoking to what the report describes as “every single one of the Committees’ substantive questions” [emphasis theirs”] stymied investigators’ attempts “to obtain more information about the fraud-prevention failures” about said interference.
So, just so we’re clear: When it comes to actual foreign interference in American elections, Democrats don’t care. It’s only when Christopher Steele produces some preposterous opposition research dossier that gets passed off to FISA courts and news outlets as legitimate intel that they get themselves all in a tizzy.
The only positive outcome here, aside from the hypocrisy, is that this will hobble, to some extent, the fast-and-loose business model that ActBlue employed for 20 years as the de facto fundraising go-to for Democrat radicals and rapscallions. That’s, at least, something.
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