Dem Fundraising Giant ActBlue Accepted Illegal Foreign Donations, Covered Up Evidence, House Report Says

ActBlue, the Democratic fundraising giant, may have accepted both fraudulent and illegal foreign contributions — and later concealed the relevant evidence from House Republicans investigating the matter, according to a new congressional report.

Congressional oversight “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,” according to the new report.

“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 — which is the third released by the Committee on House Administration, the House Judiciary Committee, and the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform regarding their investigation into ActBlue — accuses the platform of accepting “illegal foreign political donations” and later undertaking a cover-up.

ActBlue CEO Regina Wallace-Jones previously wrote in a letter to Committee on House Administration Chairman Bryan Steil (R., Wis.) in 2023, when the investigation began, explaining that donations made by people with addresses outside of the U.S. require a passport number for verification.

But the report argues the step does little to prevent fraud, as it “only ensures that the entered passport number contains a certain number of characters, not that it is a valid U.S. passport number.”

ActBlue’s previous law firm, Covington & Burling, told ActBlue in 2025 that Wallace-Jones may have misled Congress in her response because the steps for vetting foreign donations were not always followed, the New York Times reported earlier this year. ActBlue processed $990 million in donations in 2023, including $1.3 million from donors with foreign addresses, according to the Washington Post. ActBlue said it collected passport numbers for 93 percent of the donations with foreign addresses.

In the new report, the House committees cite internal communications in which ActBlue employees appear to downplay warnings of fraud. “Donor sometimes has an IP in Hong Kong, but none of their other signals raise any eyebrows,” employees wrote in one memo about a “great accept.”

In another message, an ActBlue supervisor says that a rejected foreign 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 says. “The donor uses an Arkansas state code, which isn’t great, but [the] system can be wonky with requiring state codes for foreign donors.”

On a separate occasion, an ActBlue supervisor said a contribution “set off a lot of” alarms, but suggested the donor should be given the “benefit of the doubt.”

ActBlue has denied any wrongdoing and is “escalating efforts to clear its name,” according to a new Washington Post report, that says attorneys for ActBlue met congressional investigators last week to present evidence that the platform properly verified the source of contributions and did not mislead lawmakers about that process. However, A Republican familiar with the matter told the paper GOP lawmakers “weren’t convinced.”

“We must continue to stand against all efforts to undermine the grassroots infrastructure that powers the Democratic Party,” Wallace-Jones said in a statement to the Washington Post.

Wallace-Jones testified before Congress in June and repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment, arguing in an essay published beforehand that doing so was the “only reasonable response” to a hearing that she claimed amounted to “harassing a political opponent’s fundraising platform, not genuine oversight.”