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Lawmakers are accusing ActBlue executives of a cover-up, with House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, warning the fundraising giant could be in serious legal jeopardy over its lax security controls and officials’ testimony to Congress.
Jordan’s Judiciary Committee, along with the House Administration and Oversight Committees, released the third interim report detailing the joint congressional investigation into ActBlue. The three committees launched the probe into the fundraising giant in 2024 after reviewing evidence that the platform, which is widely used by Democratic Party campaigns and progressive causes, accepted donations from foreign sources and employed lax verification standards.
The new report provides evidence that its passport verification system, which it previously told Congress was designed to exclude foreign donors from contributing to its system, did not actually verify passport numbers at all. Instead, ActBlue only verified that the number of characters matched the number used in valid passport numbers, according to internal company messages released by the committees.
ActBlue staff may have approved donations using the platform despite red flags
The communications also show that, in some instances, ActBlue staff appears to have approved donations using the platform despite red flags that indicated donors may not be inside the United States, such as a foreign IP address.
“They told us, oh, we have rigorous passport verification systems in place. When people are contributing from a site that’s overseas, we make them write down their passport number. Yeah, but they don’t check the number. You could write down 123456, You could just write it down like, oh, there’s a number there, everything’s fine. This is the operation they ran,” Jordan told the Just the News, No Noise TV show on Thursday.
“It sure looks like something’s not being done the way it’s supposed to be, and it’s again why I think the Justice Department, in addition to our investigation, the Justice Department’s investigating these guys, and we’ll see where that goes,” Jordan added later.
Part of larger crackdown on foreign straw donors in elections
President Donald Trump issued a presidential memorandum earlier this year to crack down on foreign straw donors in elections, instructing federal agencies to take action on the concerns raised by Congress. The memo tasked the Justice Department to investigate and decide whether any criminal charges or lawsuits should be filed against ActBlue, which has admitted it did not follow common anti-fraud protections for much of the 2024 election, Just the News reported.
According to the internal documents published by the lawmakers, the company prompted prospective donors with foreign addresses to input a passport number for identity verification. However, ActBlue said that the company did not verify whether the number belonged to a real passport, but only that the number of characters matched. They called it “basic validation.”
ActBlue provided “alternative method[s] of verifying the [donor’s] citizenship”
“We use some very basic validation–number of characters–to ensure that the number entered is a valid passport number, but we do not verify the information in any other way,” reads an ActBlue customer service page. “We do not, for instance, check the information provided against a government database. We merely store the information and continue with the contribution flow.”
Additionally, the committees found that if a prospective donor could not provide a passport number, ActBlue employees can determine an “alternative method of verifying the [donor’s] citizenship.” This practice, the committees found, encouraged ActBlue employees to use placeholder passport numbers in order to reach the next stage of the donation process.
In one instance, they found, “ActBlue accepted a contribution from a foreign donor who provided copies of a Form 225-A (“Card of Identity and Registration), which expired on August 27, 1974, and a birth certificate from the Detroit Health Department, but no U.S. passport,” the report reads. ActBlue’s Legal and Compliance team who reviewed the transaction concluded that “[t]his seems like sufficient evidence to me!”
You can read the joint report below:
Republicans are “refusing to move on,” ActBlue says
ActBlue has consistently denied wrongdoing.
“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,” ActBlue said in a statement. “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.”
During the investigation, ActBlue’s most senior officials have repeatedly invoked their Fifth Amendment rights when asked questions about the company’s lax security practices. ActBlue CEO Regina Wallace-Jones invoked that right 22 times in her appearance earlier this summer before the committees leading the probe. Many of the other ActBlue officials and leaders also invoked the Fifth.
Lawmakers are raising concerns about a concerted effort by ActBlue’s leadership to cover up its lax security practices, and retaliate against internal whistleblowers who raised questions about them. An outside law firm working for ActBlue warned the company in 2024 that it may have misled Congress in a 2023 letter that claimed it used “multilayered” screenings of contributions to help “root out” donations from overseas after the lawyers found that some of ActBlue’s fraud prevention steps were not always followed, according to The New York Times.
Amid the internal chaos at the company sparked by the congressional investigation, ActBlue’s interim General Counsel Aaron Ting resigned. His letter of resignation reportedly cited “ActBlue’s past practices for screening political donations from abroad and its past representations to Congress regarding foreign donations and related matters.”
ActBlue’s lawyers purportedly warned them
The committees reported that after Ting’s resignation, the company’s last remaining lawyer on the legal team, Zain Ahmad, “reportedly notified ActBlue leadership, including ActBlue’s Board of Directors, of credible allegations of misconduct at the company, including significant alleged violations of federal campaign finance law and false statements to Congress.”
According to the committee, Ahmad was placed on “a suspicious medical leave” and had his access to company email revoked. When Ahmed sent a message to IT services to request his access be restored, Hanna Bonin, ActBlue’s director of IT, deleted the request. Ahmed appeared to suspect that he was facing retaliation for raising internal concerns about company policy.
“Please be advised that we have Anti-Retaliation and Whistleblower Policies for a reason,” Ahmed said. In all, ActBlue deleted six of Ahmed’s messages, including a stark warning: that by deleting his requests, ActBlue was “violating” its own “laws and policies.”
Ultimately, after the outside counsel raised serious concerns about possible illegal conduct at the company, “the platform’s entire legal and compliance team either resigned, was fired, or went on extended leave within just four months after the 2024 election,” the committees found.
ActBlue issued new standards encouraging staff to “look for reasons to accept contributions”
ActBlue’s leaders have been reluctant to answer questions from Congress about what was going on inside the company around that election.
“Every single one of them took the Fifth, and I think the reason they took the Fifth is because all the facts stack up against them. I mean that we have communications where they said, well, you know, we’re going to lessen our fraud standards, so we don’t want to jeopardize the money coming in. By the way, billions of dollars, billions of dollars every cycle that this ActBlue brings in for Democrats,” Jordan told Just the News.
In their first interim report, the committees uncovered evidence the platform changed its donation policies twice during the 2024 election cycle to make its standards “more lenient” and had received donations from foreign sources. According to internal company documents reviewed by the committees in that report, during the 2024 campaign cycle, ActB
