GOP House Committees Accuse Dem Fundraising Platform Of Using ‘Bad Actors’
Three key House committees are set to deliver an update to the Department of Justice on Wednesday regarding the Republicans’ ongoing investigation into ActBlue, Fox News first reported on Thursday.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.), Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), and House Administration Committee Chairman Bryan Steil (R-Wis.) have been conducting a years-long inquiry into the Democratic fundraising platform. “The Committees write today to draw your attention to our ongoing investigation into ActBlue, a political action committee and fundraising platform for the Democrat Party,” the letter said.
“The oversight has uncovered that ActBlue has weak fraud-prevention practices and overlooks bad actors, including foreign actors, who take advantage of the platform to make illicit political donations,” the letter continued.
The three chairmen said the platform’s “concerning activities” could even have a “direct effect on U.S. political campaigns and elections.”
Steil first raised concerns about ActBlue in late 2023 following allegations that the platform did not require a card verification value (CVV) number for credit card donations—a practice lawmakers argued made contributions significantly less secure, Fox noted.
The letter to the DOJ said ActBlue offered a “lackluster response” to initial inquiries. By August 2024, however, the platform had begun requiring CVV numbers on donation pages monitored by Fox News Digital, including those for former Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign.
Still, the letter noted, Republicans continued to press ActBlue for further clarification and accountability.
Steil’s panel subpoenaed ActBlue for “documents relating to ActBlue’s donor verification policies, contributions originating outside of the United States, deplatformed entities, and reported unauthorized or fraudulent donations.”
“ActBlue’s responsive documents confirmed that the platform accepted unverified payments during a period of record campaign fundraising,” the letter said.
“Although ActBlue has since updated its policies to reject donations without safeguards such as a CVV requirement, the Committees’ oversight found that ActBlue implemented these changes only after ensuring that they would not negatively impact Democrat donations,” it added.
Follow-up inquiries into whether the fundraising platform and related entities were serious in deterring foreign actors “have shed some light on the nature of their operations, but many questions remain.”
Last month, the three committees released a report claiming “ActBlue executives and staff are aware that both foreign and domestic fraudulent actors are exploiting the platform but do not take the threat seriously.”
Officials with ActBlue previously dismissed Steil’s accusations as “inaccuracies and misrepresentations.”
“We rigorously protect donors’ security and maintain strict anti-fraud compliance practices. We have zero tolerance for fraud on our platform,” an ActBlue spokesperson said late last year.
One of the biggest issues that congressional and private investigators have discovered most often is that thousands of small-dollar donations were being made by the same people, but without their knowledge.
James O’Keefe of the O’keefe Media Group interviewed several people in 2023 who had allegedly made multiple scores of small-dollar donations to ActBlue, with many of them telling him that, no, they hadn’t personally done so. Others who had donated a couple of times through ActBlue denied making the number of donations the platform claimed came from them.
“[H]e interviewed dozens of Americans who had never donated to Democrat candidates, but whose names and identities were being logged into the ActBlue online system, showing them making hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations. Many of these ActBlue victims were retired people on a fixed income who said they had no ability to have made such donations,” Must Read Alaska reported in September.
Comer and other Republicans brought the matter to then-Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, requesting any and all “suspicious activity reports” made to the agency regarding ActBlue.
“The Committee on Oversight and Accountability is investigating reports of potentially fraudulent and illicit financial activity related to contributions to campaigns of candidates for federal offices mediated by online fundraising platforms like ActBlue,” they wrote last fall.
