Three House committees released a joint report Wednesday on ActBlue, the fundraising platform that processes money for basically the entire Democratic Party. Two years of investigation by the Judiciary, Administration and Oversight committees. ActBlue pleaded the 5th.
Then you get to the part about the fraud prevention team.
According to the report, ActBlue's internal trainings instructed its fraud prevention staff to look for reasons to accept contributions.
Read that again slowly. The department whose entire job is catching bad transactions was reportedly told to go find justifications for approving them.
That is not a fraud prevention department. That is a sales team with a worse name.
It gets better.
The committees say ActBlue decided in 2024 to take what it described in its own words as a more lenient approach to fraud prevention, and weakened its policies at least twice, even though internal assessments warned the changes would produce a measurable increase in fraudulent contributions.
So somebody ran the numbers, reported that loosening the screening would let more fraud through, and the answer came back: loosen it anyway. Twice.
Analysts were reportedly instructed to give donors the benefit of the doubt and to disregard red flags on transactions carrying foreign indicators. Employees who had already rejected donations over signs of illegal foreign money were, per the report, told to go back and accept them.
And the crown jewel: a passport verification process that reportedly did not require a valid United States passport number.
A passport check that does not check passports. Somewhere a compliance officer wrote that sentence with a straight face.
Then there is the woman in Michigan.
Recent reporting describes an elderly Michigan woman whose name appears on roughly 15,000 separate donations totaling more than $150,000, distributed among various Democratic candidates including Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed.
She lives in a trailer. She is on a fixed income. She says she did not make them, though she acknowledges sending some money to Democrats at some point.
Fifteen thousand donations is about forty per day, every day, for a year.
Nobody should laugh at her. If the reporting holds, she is the victim here, and the fact that somebody apparently ran a six-figure operation through a retiree's name is the single most alarming detail in the entire story. Whatever you think of ActBlue, whatever you think of the committees investigating it, a woman on a fixed income should not be showing up as one of the most prolific political donors in America.
About the Fifth Amendment.
Five current and former ActBlue employees who sat for depositions invoked their Fifth Amendment protection 146 times.
We will say what we said when Fauci's adviser did it and when the birth tourism guy did it. Invoking the Fifth is a constitutional right, not a confession. Any competent attorney would advise it, and a movement that defends constitutional protections does not get to treat their use as proof of guilt when the person using them is on the other team.
But 146 times among five people is about twenty-nine each, and the legal and compliance teams reportedly emptied out after the 2024 election. People do not generally flee a company whose paperwork is in good order.
One thing conservatives should not skip.
This is an interim report from a Republican-led investigation, and ActBlue has consistently denied the allegations. The New York Times has separately reported that ActBlue's own lawyers warned the CEO may have given potentially misleading answers to investigators, which is not nothing, but none of this has been tested in court yet. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has filed suit. That is where it gets tested.
And the broader point applies to everybody. The small-dollar online fundraising ecosystem is a black box on both sides of the aisle, running billions of dollars through platforms nobody audits in real time, with verification standards set by the companies collecting the fees.
Republicans use their own version of this machinery. If the standard is that platforms should verify donors are real Americans making real donations, that standard applies to the platform your favorite candidate uses too.
The bottom line.
Federal law prohibits foreign nationals from funding American elections. That is not a partisan position, it is the statute.
If a platform moving billions of dollars told its fraud team to hunt for reasons to approve suspicious money, somebody should have to explain that under oath.
Preferably without invoking the Fifth twenty-nine times.
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