ActBlue, an organization that is one of the biggest Democratic fundraisers in the game, is now being put under a microscope as House Republicans allege that the group is weakening fraud safeguards, accepting suspicious contributions, and misleading Congress about how it screens donations. The investigation is being led by House Administration Committee Chairman Bryan Steil (R-WI).
Working alongside Steil is Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY). The latest report from the group alleges that ActBlue has repeatedly relaxed fraud-prevention standards, despite internal reviews warning that making such changes could allow fraudulent donations to slip through the cracks.
“The Committees’ oversight has found that ActBlue, in its own words, decided to take ‘a more lenient approach’ to fraud prevention in 2024, weakening its fraud-prevention policies at least twice even though internal assessments showed that these changes would result in a measurable increase in fraudulent contributions,” the report went on to say, citing an ActBlue staff report.
According to Trending Politics News, several other GOP-led committees also cited information contained in internal training materials that they claim encourage employees to approve questionable transactions whenever possible, which allows them to pull in money from less than savory places and individuals, building up their resource pot.
“Similarly, internal trainings directed ActBlue’s fraud prevention team to ‘look for reasons to accept contributions’ rather than to examine them closely for indicators of fraud — as required by federal regulation. ActBlue took this lax approach to fraud prevention even though it had detected at least 22 significant fraud campaigns on the platform in recent years, including several from foreign sources,” the report continued.
The committees are also claiming that ActBlue has been accepting illegal foreign political contributions, while working to cover up the matter when congressional investigators start digging into the platform’s practices. A big point of dispute concerns the way ActBlue verifies donations from folks that use an address outside of the United States.
ActBlue CEO Regina-Wallace Jones previously delivered testimony before Congress, saying that donors with addresses outside of the U.S. were required to provide the organization with a passport number. The GOP, however, alleges that the system only checks to see if the number provided meets the required number of characters and did not verify if the passport was valid.
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A memo from within ActBlue spoke of a donation as a “great accept,” including a note that read, “Donor sometimes has an IP in Hong Kong, but none of their other signals raise any eyebrows.” Another that has been cited by investigators as cause for concern notes that a donation had previously been denied, though a supervisor made the case that the contribution “should have been accepted.”
““It is a foreign contribution, but the name/email match, the IP/billing match, a full address with the correct country code, and there were previously accepted and successful contributions,” the message continued. “The donor uses an Arkansas state code, which isn’t great, but the system can be wonky with requiring state codes for foreign donors.”
Investigators also pointed to a case in which a supervisor for the platform admitted that a contribution “set off a lot of” alarms, but argued the donor should be given the “benefit of the doubt.” ActBlue has denied the allegations made against them and has claimed repeatedly that they have not knowingly facilitated illegal foreign donations.
Republicans have stated that the goal of the probe is to determine whether foreign money or fraudulent donations have entered U.S. political campaigns through online fundraising systems. Democrats and folks with ActBlue have stated that the investigation is politically motivated and is designed to undermine one of the party’s most crucial fundraising platforms.
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