Three House committees released an interim report alleging that ActBlue, the Democratic Party's dominant fundraising platform, recklessly funneled foreign money into American elections, then retaliated against the lawyers who tried to stop it.
The joint report from the House Administration Committee, the House Judiciary Committee, and the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform lays out what investigators describe as a years-long pattern: a verification system built to look rigorous on paper while doing almost nothing in practice, supervisors who told fraud analysts to wave through suspicious donations, and a company that fired or silenced every attorney who objected. ActBlue CEO Regina Wallace-Jones, compelled to testify before Congress in June, repeatedly invoked her Fifth Amendment rights, the Daily Caller News Foundation reported.
ActBlue has raised nearly $20 billion since its founding. The company dismissed the report as "another political stunt" timed to hurt Democrats before the midterms. But the committee's findings draw on ActBlue's own internal records, Slack messages, supervisor instructions, and a log of flagged donations covering 2022 through 2024, and they tell a story the company's press releases do not.
When a donor enters a non-U.S. address on ActBlue, a popup asks for a passport number. Wallace-Jones told the House Administration Committee in a 2023 letter that ActBlue runs a "multilayered" and "rigorous" process that "roots out" foreign contributions. She wrote plainly: "Only donations with passport information are processed."
The committee's investigation found that claim was, at best, incomplete. The only validation ActBlue performed on those passport numbers was confirming they contained the correct number of digits. The platform never checked the information against any government database. ActBlue's own customer service page stated it openly: "We do not, for instance, check the information provided against a government database. We merely store the information and continue with the contribution flow," the New York Post reported.
In other words, any string of numbers with the right digit count sailed through. A donor typing random digits from a foreign IP address faced no real barrier.
The problem went further. ActBlue did not require donors to supply a CVV, the three- or four-digit security code on the back of a credit card, a basic fraud-prevention step that most online payment systems treat as standard. That gap is what first prompted the House Administration Committee to open its investigation in October 2023, the Washington Examiner noted. And for donors using third-party payment apps like Apple Pay or Venmo, ActBlue did not verify passport information at all, a direct contradiction of Wallace-Jones's blanket assurance to Congress.
Internal records obtained by the committee paint a picture of a fraud-prevention team that existed largely on paper. Supervisors instructed analysts to "look for reasons to accept contributions" rather than scrutinize them, according to internal training materials cited in the report. When analysts flagged donations from foreign IP addresses, supervisors pushed back.
One supervisor's internal message, quoted in the report, addressed a donor who "sometimes has an IP in Hong Kong but none of their other signals raise any eyebrows." The instruction: accept the money. Another supervisor told employees to process donations from a contributor with "a few foreign IPs" because "they are all consistently in the same place." The standing order, per the committee's findings, was to "give the donor the benefit of the doubt" and accept every donation, no matter how risky.
The committee also found that ActBlue adopted what its own internal documents described as "a more lenient approach" to fraud prevention in 2024, weakening its policies at least twice during an election cycle in which the platform processed $3.8 billion. Internal assessments showed these changes would produce a measurable increase in fraudulent contributions, National Review reported.
Even a small percentage of that $3.8 billion represents serious money. At just one percent, potentially foreign-sourced donations would total roughly $38 million flowing into Democratic campaign coffers in a single cycle.
ActBlue retained Covington & Burling, one of Washington's most prominent law firms, to advise on its compliance obligations. What the firm found alarmed its attorneys. Covington lawyers warned ActBlue in internal memos that the steps Wallace-Jones described in her 2023 letter to Congress were not always followed, and that the gap between her representations and the company's actual practices created what the firm called "substantial risk."
The firm's legal memo was blunt. Covington warned that "it can be alleged that ActBlue accepted and/or facilitated the acceptance of foreign-national contributions into American elections," and that because "ActBlue's staff was aware that its system was not as robust as necessary, it could be alleged that these violations were knowing and willful," the Washington Free Beacon reported. That language, "knowing and willful", is the legal threshold for criminal liability under federal campaign finance law.
Covington also warned that Wallace-Jones's 2023 letter contained a "potentially misleading" response, and that the discrepancy presented the possibility of a criminal investigation if prosecutors concluded ActBlue had tried to conceal the facts, Breitbart reported.
ActBlue's response to its own lawyers' warnings was swift. The company terminated Covington & Burling in March 2025. It then accused the firm of "counsel that bordered on malpractice", a charge Covington forcefully denied.
The pattern is familiar in Washington: when the lawyers say something leadership does not want to hear, the lawyers go. It is a pattern that extends well beyond ActBlue. California Gov. Gavin Newsom's long-delayed tax returns surfaced only after a federal probe closed in, another case of Democratic leaders dragging their feet on transparency until outside pressure forced the issue.
The fallout inside ActBlue went beyond the Covington firing. By February 2025, internal Slack messages revealed a company in open revolt. Most of ActBlue's legal team had already departed. The last remaining in-house attorney alleged he faced illegal retaliation for raising concerns about the company's practices.
ActBlue's Director of IT, Hanna Bonin, then deleted that attorney's Slack messages, the internal communications in which he had documented his retaliation claims. The committee obtained records describing this sequence of events over the summer.
Aaron Ting, a former ActBlue in-house attorney, spelled out his reasons for leaving in a resignation letter. "I am concerned that leadership is not fully committed to transparently addressing with the Board the seriousness of our most pressing concerns," Ting wrote. After the 2024 election, ActBlue's entire legal and compliance team reportedly resigned, citing the platform's "knowing and willful" acceptance of illegal foreign contributions and subsequent cover-up.
When every lawyer in the building walks out the door over the same issue, it is worth asking what they saw. The question of foreign money in American elections is not a partisan abstraction. It is a federal crime, and the people closest to ActBlue's internal operations concluded the company was committing it. Democrats who spent years sounding alarms about foreign influence in American politics now face a case where their own fundraising machine stands accused of enabling exactly that.
The House Administration Committee first flagged ActBlue as a potential conduit for foreign money laundering in October 2024. By June 2026, the committee had compelled Wallace-Jones to appear. She showed up, and repeatedly invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
ActBlue replaced Covington with WilmerHale, a firm with its own political baggage. WilmerHale previously employed the late FBI Director Robert S. Mueller and two of his aides. In March 2025, the Trump White House issued Executive Order 14250 seeking to cut off WilmerHale from federal contracts and jobs, alleging the firm maintained a racially discriminatory DEI policy and engaged in pro bono liberal advocacy.
WilmerHale briefed the committee the Friday before the report's release and sent a letter describing foreign donations as "vanishingly rare." The firm stated that "in 2023 ActBlue collected a passport number at the time of contribution for 93% of foreign-address contribution dollars." But WilmerHale's own letter did not dispute the committee's central finding: that those passport numbers were never actually verified against any government database. Collecting a number and checking a number are two different things.
ActBlue told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the report amounts to nothing:
"There's nothing to see here. 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."
The company added that "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."
Rep. Elise Stefanik called the investigation "among the biggest bombshell campaign finance corruption and actual foreign election interference stories in American politics." Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton put it more directly: "There are legitimate, grave concerns that ActBlue has enabled illegal fundraising. By failing to prevent widespread straw-donor schemes and other tactics, it is likely that fraudulent and even foreign-sourced contributions have crept into Democrat campaign coffers."
President Trump has ordered the Department of Justice to investigate ActBlue, and Rep. James Comer has alleged that the Biden administration covered up "hundreds" of suspicious activity reports related to the platform. The FBI and Judicial Watch are also pursuing separate inquiries. Whether any of these investigations produce charges remains an open question, but the volume of concurrent probes, from Congress to the DOJ to outside watchdogs, is difficult to dismiss as mere partisan theater.
Democrats who once promised to make Republican finances their top oversight target now find themselves on the wrong end of the same scrutiny. And the party that built its brand on protecting elections from foreign interference has yet to explain how its biggest fundraising engine spent years waving through donations from Hong Kong IP addresses with fake passport numbers.
Several critical questions remain. The committee's report does not specify the total dollar amount of contributions believed to be of foreign origin. It does not name specific foreign governments or actors beyond the Hong Kong IP reference. And ActBlue has not explained what its "third-party forensic analysis" actually found, or why it should outweigh the testimony of its own former lawyers.
The Federal Election Commission and DOJ have not announced formal enforcement actions. No charges have been filed. But the documentary record, internal memos, resignation letters, deleted messages, and a CEO who took the Fifth, already tells a story that no press release can revise. Even some Democrats have acknowledged their party has bigger problems than it wants to admit.
ActBlue built a $20 billion machine on the promise that small-dollar democracy was clean democracy. The people who knew that machine best, its own lawyers, walked out and said it wasn't.