New Report: ActBlue's Failure to Prevent Illegal Foreign Political Contributions
In late 2024, the Committees began investigating ActBlue's fraud-prevention practices. The Committees have since released two interim staff reports detailing ActBlue's "lenient approach" to fraud prevention in 2024 and the resulting collapse of the platform's legal and compliance team in the months after the 2024 election. During the investigation, ActBlue assured the Committees that it had produced all information relevant to the Committees' inquiry. However, on April 2, 2026, the New York Times published an article about ActBlue's fraud-prevention practices, which contained facts and cited documents that ActBlue had not produced to the Committees.
Among other details, the Times quoted from two documents—an employee resignation letter and internal company messages—revealing fraud and whistleblower retaliation at ActBlue. The Times also reported that ActBlue's outside counsel and former Biden White House Counsel, Dana Remus, drafted memoranda for ActBlue concluding that CEO Regina Wallace-Jones may have misled Congress about ActBlue's review processes for foreign contributions, and that ActBlue's acceptance of illegal foreign contributions appeared to be "knowing and willful." Following these reports, the Committees requested additional documents related to ActBlue's processes for reviewing foreign contributions.
New information obtained by the Committees reveals new details about ActBlue's unserious approach to fraud prevention on its platform, including:
- ActBlue's policies that allegedly "prevent" illegal, fraudulent political contributions;
- 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; and
- 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.
The documents produced to the Committees also detail several scenarios in which ActBlue supervisors instruct fraud prevention analysts to "give the donor the benefit of the doubt" in making a contribution, despite multiple red flags. Oftentimes, ActBlue employees were instructed to accept a donation that they had previously rejected for signs of an illegal foreign contribution. One ActBlue employee noted 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." In another case, an analyst reported "an odd pattern of small donations to the [Kamala] Harris campaign using prepaid cards," which another ActBlue employee affirmed were "good to accept."
The findings in this report expand upon the Committees' earlier revelations about ActBlue's flawed and inadequate fraud-prevention practices. As explained in the Committees' initial report from April 2025, ActBlue weakened its fraud-prevention standards twice in 2024 to take "a more lenient approach" to fraud prevention by triggering fewer manual reviews. 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.
Despite ActBlue continuing to withhold documents and obstruction with the Committees' oversight, the Committees will continue to pursue the facts to inform potential legislative reform to ensure that American elections are safe, secure, and decided only by American citizens.
Read the full interim staff report here.
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