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| C-SPAN / YOUTUBE |
The Dems’ fundraising giant’s passport verification system was ‘essentially toothless,’ a congressional report asserts.
Benefit of the doubt.That’s apparently the phrase that paid when it came to the left’s fundraising giant’s handling of potential foreign donations, according to the findings of a new congressional report into the ActBlue cash scandal.
In their third interim report, the House Administration, Judiciary and Oversight committees have released internal ActBlue documents that expose what seems to be the left-wing organization’s blasé attitude about laws prohibiting contributions from foreign actors to political campaigns.
Among the latest installment’s key findings:
— ActBlue’s policies that allegedly “prevent” illegal, fraudulent political contributions could be bypassed easily by foreign actors.
— ActBlue’s “passport verification process,” which allegedly prevents illegal foreign donations, is an ineffective security method that does not actually require a valid U.S. passport number.
— ActBlue repeatedly instructed its fraud prevention analysts to “give the donor the benefit of the doubt” and to ignore red flags about contributions with foreign indicators.
“I wish I could say that [the new records] surprise me, but in many ways this is almost what you expect,” Rep. Bryan Steil, R-Wis., chairman of the Administration Committee, said Thursday in an interview on The Federalist Radio Hour. “I have been engaged in this investigation now for three years and what we continue to realize is that ActBlue has not been taking fraud seriously.”
‘Knowing and Willful’
Since launching in 2004, the cash machine for leftist politicians, groups, and causes has raised nearly $20 billion, including nearly $1.8 billion last year.
The committees began looking into ActBlue’s fraud prevention practices following the 2024 presidential election. Steil and majority Republicans on the Administration Committee were raising concerns and asking for answers in 2023.
As The Federalist has reported, records obtained through congressional subpoenas confirmed suspicions that ActBlue had accepted unverified payments during record-smashing fundraising totals for the Democrat Party’s presidential replacement candidate, then-Vice President Kamala Harris, in the summer of 2024.
Harris raised a jaw-dropping $81 million in the 24 hours following President Joe Biden calling it quits in July 2024. “In August, the campaign said it raised $361 million, bringing the total to more than $615 million in fundraising since Harris had entered the race,” CBS News reported in October 2024. The congressional investigation has found donations poured through the platform from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Colombia, and other countries, as The Federalist previously reported.
ActBlue has denied wrongdoing and insists that it has cooperated with the committees’ oversight requests. In an April 28 letter, the fundraising platform called claims that officials have impeded the congressional investigation “baseless.”
But following a New York Times report on ActBlue in April, the committees found the fundraising platform had failed to turn over all requested documents. The Times reported that Dana Remus, ActBlue’s outside counsel and former Biden White House counsel, drafted a memo advising that CEO Regina Wallace-Jones may have misled Congress about the contribution collector’s review processes for foreign donations and that ActBlue’s acceptance of illegal foreign contributions appeared to be “knowing and willful.”
‘Essentially Toothless’
In 2023, Wallace-Jones had told Steil’s Committee on House Administration that ActBlue’s multi-layered vetting process required passport information from donors providing an address outside of the U.S. and that “[o]nly donations with passport information are processed.”
But new internal documents reveal ActBlue’s “passport verification” system was “essentially toothless,” the committees report states.
“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,” an ActBlue memo notes. “We do not, for instance, check the information provided against a government database. We merely store the information and continue with the contribution flow.”
The committees’ report asserts the process could allow foreign actors to enter “any random combination of numbers and donate to political campaigns in the United States, in violation of federal law.”
Internal documents also show that ActBlue allowed employees to determine an “alternative method of verifying the [donor’s] citizenship” for donors who do not have U.S. passports. ActBlue’s legal team needed to be in on the solution, the communication suggests, but employees were encouraged to put a “a placeholder in the passport number field of [the donor’s] ActBlue account.” --->READ MORE HERE
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