A new congressional staff report alleges ActBlue used inadequate safeguards against foreign political contributions and retaliated against an attorney who raised legal concerns, while the Democratic fundraising platform says a forensic review found foreign-address donations were extremely rare and its procedures overwhelmingly worked as intended.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom
WASHINGTON — Republican-led House committees investigating ActBlue released a new report this week alleging that weaknesses in the Democrat fundraising platform’s donor-verification system could have allowed prohibited foreign political contributions to pass through its network and that company leaders retaliated against an attorney who raised concerns about possible legal violations.
ActBlue disputes the allegations, calling the investigation politically motivated and pointing to a recently completed forensic analysis that it says shows virtually all of the political contributions processed during the period examined came from donors who supplied either U.S. addresses or information indicating U.S. citizenship.
The Wednesday interim staff report was issued jointly by the House Committee on Administration, House Judiciary Committee and House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. It represents the latest stage of an investigation that began in 2023 and does not constitute a judicial finding that ActBlue violated campaign-finance law.
Among the report’s central findings is that ActBlue’s former procedure for contributors listing foreign addresses asked those donors to provide a U.S. passport number but did not independently determine whether that number corresponded to an actual passport.
According to records obtained by the committees, ActBlue’s system checked whether an entered passport number contained the appropriate number of characters rather than comparing it against a government database. Once that basic formatting test was satisfied, the contribution could proceed, according to the report.
The committees argue that such a system could be circumvented by entering a fabricated number of the proper length.
That finding has become particularly significant because of a November 2023 letter from ActBlue CEO Regina Wallace-Jones describing the company’s procedures for handling donors located outside the United States.
“Only donations with passport information are processed,” the letter stated.
The committees contend that subsequent internal records raise questions about whether the safeguards described to Congress operated as rigorously as the letter suggested. Congressional investigators have consequently raised the possibility that Wallace-Jones made false statements to Congress. Any assertion that she committed perjury would require a separate legal determination and has not been established by the committee report.
Wallace-Jones has previously defended ActBlue’s security procedures, while the committees have continued seeking documents and testimony concerning how those procedures operated.
The investigation’s timeline dates to October 2023, when the House Administration Committee began examining ActBlue’s fraud-prevention practices amid concerns that the platform did not require a card verification value for some transactions. By October 2024, committee investigators were publicly raising concerns about whether the system could facilitate prohibited foreign political contributions.
New records obtained by investigators this year included internal reviews of transactions flagged as potentially risky between October 2022 and October 2024.
According to the committee report, supervisors sometimes instructed fraud-prevention employees to approve transactions displaying indicators that could suggest foreign activity.
One reviewed donor used a Hong Kong IP address. Another had “a few foreign IPs,” according to internal material cited by investigators, but supervisors reportedly concluded that “they are all consistently in the same place.”
The report also cited repeated instructions for analysts to “give the donor the benefit of the doubt” when reviewing flagged contributions. The committees say those records demonstrate that suspicious indicators did not necessarily result in contributions being rejected.
Questions were also raised about whether contributors using payment systems such as Apple Pay, PayPal and Venmo were consistently subjected to the same passport requirements.
ActBlue now disputes that characterization.
In a new analysis released this week, the platform said donors entering foreign addresses were required to supply passport numbers regardless of whether they used traditional card payments or services including Apple Pay, Google Pay and PayPal.
ActBlue said a forensic review of its 2023 political-contribution data found that 99.99% of nearly $990 million in contributions came from donors who either provided U.S. addresses or passport numbers. It said just 0.13% of contribution dollars originated from donors with foreign addresses and that the overwhelming majority of those donors provided passport information.
The review was performed by FTI Consulting and presented to congressional investigators by ActBlue’s current law firm, WilmerHale, according to The Washington Post. ActBlue said passport information was collected for 93% of political-contribution dollars associated with foreign addresses in 2023.
The review does not dispute that ActBlue’s former passport-number system did not authenticate the numbers through a government passport database. The dispute instead centers in part on how effectively the platform’s combination of safeguards prevented unlawful contributions in practice.
ActBlue characterized the congressional report as a partisan effort targeting an organization heavily used by Democratic candidates and causes.
“There’s nothing to see here,” ActBlue said in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation. “After we released findings of a third-party forensic analysis that completely undermined a central claim that they have made against ActBlue, Republicans are refusing to move on. Instead, they are orchestrating another political stunt before rushing out of town weeks early to go campaign.”
“This coordinated campaign against ActBlue isn’t about the facts, or legislating, it’s about Republicans’ efforts to silence organizations they believe threaten their agenda,” an ActBlue spokesperson added.
The company’s website describes ActBlue as a fundraising platform serving Democratic campaigns and allied organizations. The source report said a running fundraising tally showed the platform had processed nearly $20 billion as of Thursday.
The congressional investigation has also examined a period of internal upheaval at ActBlue that became public in early 2025.
After much of the organization’s legal staff departed, attorney Zain Ahmad became the last remaining lawyer in ActBlue’s legal operation. Congressional investigators allege that Ahmad notified company leadership and the board of concerns involving potential campaign-finance violations and statements previously made to Congress.
The House report says Ahmad subsequently went on leave and lost access to internal systems even though ActBlue policy provided that employees on such leave would retain access to certain essential systems. Investigators describe that sequence as possible retaliation.
Internal Slack communications obtained during the investigation also became part of the congressional inquiry. According to the material provided, ActBlue Director of IT Hanna Bonin deleted messages associated with Ahmad after concerns were raised.
Those facts are cited by committee investigators as evidence of possible retaliation, but the committee’s characterization remains an allegation rather than a court finding.
The legal concerns extended to ActBlue’s outside counsel.
The organization had retained Covington & Burling, whose attorneys reportedly warned company officials about potential legal exposure involving the treatment of foreign contributions and the accuracy of previous representations to Congress. ActBlue terminated the firm in March 2025, according to reporting on the dispute.
When The New York Times later reported on the internal legal concerns, Wallace-Jones accused Covington & Burling of providing “counsel that bordered on malpractice.”
Covington rejected that characterization and defended the advice its attorneys had given ActBlue.
The dispute over the 2023 congressional letter became particularly important because former attorneys reportedly warned that some of the foreign-donor screening procedures described in that correspondence were not consistently followed.
By June, congressional investigators compelled Wallace-Jones to appear for testimony. She repeatedly invoked her Fifth Amendment rights in response to lawmakers’ questions.
Invoking the Fifth Amendment is a constitutional right and does not itself establish guilt or wrongdoing.
ActBlue has since retained WilmerHale as counsel. The firm participated in presenting the new forensic analysis to congressional investigators and argues that the data supports ActBlue’s contention that prohibited foreign contributions were exceedingly uncommon.
WilmerHale itself has previously been the subject of federal political controversy. A March 2025 executive order issued by Trump targeted the firm over its diversity policies and legal work. WilmerHale had previously employed former FBI Director Robert S. Mueller, who served as special counsel during the Russia investigation, as well as lawyers who worked with him.
Those connections are separate from the evidence concerning ActBlue’s donor-verification procedures and do not establish anything about the accuracy of the forensic review.
The central dispute now before congressional investigators concerns what the internal records demonstrate about ActBlue’s historical safeguards.
The House committees contend that a system relying on unverified passport-number formatting, coupled with internal instructions allowing some transactions involving foreign indicators to proceed, exposed U.S. elections to prohibited foreign contributions and contradicted earlier assurances from ActBlue leadership.
ActBlue says the actual contribution data points in the opposite direction: foreign-address donations represented a tiny fraction of its political fundraising, passport information was obtained for nearly all of those dollars, and its compliance procedures successfully protected the platform against unlawful foreign funding.
Federal law prohibits foreign nationals from making contributions in connection with U.S. elections. The committees’ interim report raises questions about whether ActBlue’s systems were adequate to enforce that prohibition, but it does not by itself establish how many, if any, unlawful foreign contributions ultimately entered American campaigns or prove that ActBlue knowingly facilitated them.
Congressional investigators are continuing to examine the company’s internal records, its former attorneys’ concerns and the accuracy of statements previously supplied to lawmakers.
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