The House Judiciary Committee, along with the House Administration Committee and the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, released an interim staff report on ActBlue, the Democratic fundraising platform.

In that report, the Committees found that ActBlue failed to prevent illegal foreign political contributions, and it's being called an "explosive" insight into the organization's practices.

Two years ago, the Committees began investigating ActBlue's fraud-prevention practices. In 2024, ActBlue changed its fraud policy twice during the presidential campaign, reportedly implementing "more lenient" standards that let foreign donors and other suspicious donor money flow into U.S. campaigns.

Earlier this year, The New York Times reported that the organization's lawyers warned that its chief executive had given potentially misleading responses to Republican investigators. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a suit against the organization over its allowing foreign donations and lying about its donation practices.

When called to testify before Congress, several ActBlue staffers ended up pleading the Fifth, and more recent reporting showed that an elderly Michigan woman made 15,000 donations totaling more than $150,000 to various candidates, including Abdul El-Sayed, through ActBlue. That woman — who lives in a trailer on a fixed income — denied making those donations, although she said she has sent some money to Democrats.

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In its report, the Committees found that not only did ActBlue CEO Regina Wallace-Jones may have misled Congress about ActBlue's review process for foreign contributions and that it appeared to be "knowing and willful" in accepting those contributions, but that the organization also engaged in whistleblower retaliation.

You can read the entire report here:

New information obtained by the Committees also showed ActBlue had an "unserious" approach to fraud prevention. This includes failed policies that allegedly "prevent" illegal, fraudulent contributions; a "passport verification process" that was an "ineffective security method" that did not require a valid U.S. passport number; and instructions to fraud prevention analysts to "give the donor the benefit of the doubt" and ignore red flags on donations with foreign indicators.

This means ActBlue employees were often instructed to accept a donation they had previously rejected over signs of being an illegal foreign contribution. One employee said that a donor who "has a few red flags, such as IP/billing mismatch and a concerning IP provider name, a foreign credit card, an odd email domain, and [is] connected to other rejected users via browser fingerprint," should be accepted because ActBlue "can't say for sure that this is fraud." An analyst reported "an odd pattern of small donations to the [Kamala] Harris campaign using prepaid cards." But another ActBlue employee said that donation was "good to accept."

In its conclusion, the report said, "American elections belong to American citizens. ActBlue, one of the largest online political contribution platforms, maintains unserious fraud-prevention practices that allow illegal foreign donations in U.S. elections. The Committees have been conducting oversight ofActBlue’s lax fraud-prevention practices since 2024. This third interim report presents new information about ActBlue’s unserious approach to fraud prevention."

It also noted that "internal logs show how ActBlue maintains a culture that instructs fraud analysts to err on the side of accepting questionable foreign donations."

ActBlue continues to deny any wrongdoing.

This report should send shockwaves through the Democrat Party, because the issue here is bigger than a handful of suspicious donations or a few questionable decisions by fraud analysts. Federal law prohibits foreign nationals from contributing to American elections, and ActBlue, as it moved billions of dollars into political campaigns, had a responsibility to take signs of foreign or fraudulent activity seriously and to follow federal law.

The Committees' investigation alleges that ActBlue repeatedly did the opposite: weakening safeguards, loosening guidelines, giving questionable donors the "benefit of the doubt," and instructing employees to look for reasons to accept contributions even when transactions raised red flags.

Those findings raise a much larger question that Congress, regulators, and ultimately ActBlue itself will have to answer: How much questionable money made it through those safeguards and into American political campaigns? And who will be held accountable for it?