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FIRST ON FOX: A Democrat fundraising giant used by the biggest players on the left is being accused of covering up the acceptance of fraudulent political donations and lying to Congress about its security standards.
Congressional Republicans are providing an update on their investigation of ActBlue — a platform for campaigns to raise money that’s used by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, and the Democratic leaders of the House and Senate, among others — that alleges the company potentially accepted foreign contributions and concealed the evidence from the GOP’s probe.
ActBlue has previously denied any wrongdoing.
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“The Committees’ oversight has 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,” the report said, citing an ActBlue staff 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.”
Republicans accused ActBlue of accepting “illegal foreign political donations” and the “subsequent cover-up” of that information.
As an example, the report cited a letter by ActBlue CEO Regina Wallace-Jones to Committee on House Administration Chairman Bryan Steil, R-Wis., which maintained that donations on the platform made by people with addresses outside the U.S. required a passport number for verification.
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But Republicans alleged that the verification “only ensures that the entered passport number contains a certain number of characters, not that it is a valid U.S. passport number,” rendering it an essentially meaningless step.
The report also included excerpts purporting to show ActBlue supervisors green-lighting donations despite “red flags,” including a memo lauding a donation as a “great accept” but noting, “Donor sometimes has an IP in Hong Kong, but none of their other signals raise any eyebrows.”
Another communication appears to show an ActBlue supervisor maintaining that a denied contribution “should have been accepted.” The rest of the memo stated, “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 donor uses an Arkansas state code, which isn’t great, but [the] system can be wonky with requiring state codes for foreign donors,” the rest of the message stated.
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An ActBlue supervisor also allegedly said a contribution “set off a lot of” alarms but argued the donor should be given the “benefit of the doubt.”
The communications excerpts were included in the report and not independently verified by Fox News Digital.
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But despite the GOP’s accusations, the report’s evidence also appears to show ActBlue employees standing by the platform.
An email from ActBlue employees shows they believe the company to be “the target of bad-faith political attacks at the hands of ill-intentioned operators.”
ActBlue also previously told the committee “there is no evidence that foreign donations through online or small-dollar contributions are a problem in U.S. elections.”
Despite the pushback in print, multiple ActBlue leaders who have appeared before Congress have opted to invoke the Fifth Amendment to avoid testifying.
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The probe is being led by Steil alongside House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky.
Democrats have denounced the investigation as a cynical effort to undermine faith in U.S. elections. But Republicans argued that it’s an effort to enhance that confidence by rooting out potential fraud.
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Fox News Digital reached out to ActBlue for a response to the report.
Read the full article here
