The Daily BS • Bo Snerdley Cuts Through It!
The Daily BS • Bo Snerdley Cuts Through It!

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ActBlue told staff to give suspicious donors ‘benefit of the doubt,’ House investigation finds

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BS BULLETIN:

  • A new House Republican staff report says ActBlue’s safeguards for preventing illegal foreign political donations were far weaker than the organization represented.
  • Internal records show employees were sometimes instructed to accept flagged donations despite foreign IP addresses, foreign credit cards and other warning signs.
  • The report also details allegations that an ActBlue lawyer faced retaliation after raising concerns about possible campaign-finance violations and statements made to Congress.

A congressional investigation into Democratic fundraising giant ActBlue has produced something more interesting than another round of partisan accusations: ActBlue’s own internal records.

A joint interim staff report released by the House Administration, Judiciary and Oversight committees says ActBlue employees were repeatedly encouraged to give suspicious donors the “benefit of the doubt” — even when transactions showed indicators of possible foreign activity. Federal law generally prohibits foreign nationals from contributing to U.S. elections.

One of the biggest questions involves ActBlue’s system for donors who supplied a foreign address. ActBlue has said those contributors are prompted to provide a U.S. passport number.

Sounds reassuring. Except investigators say the passport wasn’t actually verified.

According to ActBlue procedures quoted by the committees, the system essentially checked whether the number entered contained the appropriate number of characters. It wasn’t checked against a government database to determine whether it belonged to a valid American passport. The information was simply stored, and the contribution process continued.

Then there are the internal reviews.

ActBlue turned over records showing how employees handled transactions flagged for potential fraud between October 2022 and October 2024. The congressional report says supervisors repeatedly reinforced a policy of giving donors the “benefit of the doubt.”

In one example described by investigators, a donor had an IP and billing-address mismatch, a foreign credit card, an unusual email domain, and a browser fingerprint connected to previously rejected users. The contribution was nevertheless approved because an employee couldn’t definitively determine it was fraudulent.

Another donor occasionally showed an IP address in Hong Kong. That contribution was also approved. A separate donor showed several foreign IP addresses, but an employee noted that they were consistently coming from the same location and approved the contribution.

And when an analyst noticed an unusual pattern of small prepaid-card donations to Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign, another employee concluded they were “good to accept.”

None of those examples, standing alone, proves the donors were foreign nationals illegally contributing to an American election. The congressional investigators’ allegation is that ActBlue’s safeguards were inadequate enough that prohibited foreign contributions could get through — and that employees were encouraged to approve questionable transactions unless they could affirmatively establish fraud.

Then there’s the whistleblower issue.

The report revisits turmoil inside ActBlue’s legal department after the 2024 election. Zain Ahmad, then the last remaining lawyer on ActBlue’s internal legal team, reportedly alerted company leadership and its board to what he considered credible allegations of misconduct, including possible violations of federal campaign-finance law and false statements to Congress.

Ahmad subsequently went on leave and had his access to internal systems revoked. Congressional investigators characterize what happened as possible whistleblower retaliation.

The investigation has also focused on ActBlue CEO Regina Wallace-Jones. According to the House Judiciary Committee, outside lawyers previously raised concerns that Wallace-Jones may have misled Congress when describing how ActBlue screened foreign contributions.

ActBlue strongly rejects the Republican committees’ conclusions.

The organization told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the investigation is a political effort to damage ActBlue before the midterm elections and pointed to an analysis conducted by its outside lawyers.

That analysis characterized foreign donations as “vanishingly rare” and said that in 2023 ActBlue collected passport numbers for 93 percent of contribution dollars associated with foreign addresses.

But there’s still a rather significant question at the center of all this: If a passport number was supposed to prove a donor was an eligible American, why wasn’t anybody verifying that it was actually a passport number?

DBS WIRE SOURCES:

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