Washington, Sep 18 (IANS) Three US House committees have accused online political fundraising platform ActBlue of failing to prevent illegal foreign donations, saying employees were told to accept contributions despite warning signs and its passport checks did not require a valid US passport number.
The House Judiciary, House Administration, and House Oversight and Government Reform committees released a joint interim staff report on the issue. Their investigation into ActBlue’s fraud-prevention practices began in late 2024.
The committees said newly obtained documents showed supervisors instructing fraud analysts to “give the donor the benefit of the doubt”, even when contributions carried multiple foreign indicators. In some cases, employees were directed to accept donations they had previously rejected over suspected foreign involvement.
The release did not include a response from ActBlue. It also did not provide a total value or number of contributions established to be illegal. The findings described in the release are the committees’ allegations.
One example involved a donor whose records raised several concerns. An employee described the donor as having “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”.
Despite those indicators, the employee said the contribution should be accepted because ActBlue “can't say for sure that this is fraud”, according to the release.
In another case, an analyst flagged “an odd pattern of small donations to the [Kamala] Harris campaign using prepaid cards”. Another employee said those contributions were “good to accept”, the committees reported.
The committees also challenged ActBlue’s passport verification process. They said the system, presented as a safeguard against illegal foreign contributions, did not actually require a valid US passport number.
The latest report follows two earlier interim staff reports on the platform’s fraud controls and subsequent departures from its legal and compliance team. According to the committees, ActBlue weakened its fraud-prevention standards twice in 2024, reducing the number of donations subjected to manual review.
The committees said ActBlue had previously assured them it had supplied all information relevant to their inquiry. They challenged that assurance after an April 2, 2026, New York Times article cited documents they said had not been provided.
According to the release’s account of that article, the newspaper quoted an employee resignation letter and internal messages concerning alleged fraud and retaliation against whistleblowers.
The release also said the newspaper reported that ActBlue’s outside counsel, former Biden White House counsel Dana Remus, had drafted memoranda raising concerns about the platform’s handling of foreign contributions.
Those memoranda, as described in the release, concluded that chief executive Regina Wallace-Jones may have misled Congress about the review process. They also said ActBlue’s acceptance of illegal foreign contributions appeared to be “knowing and willful”.
--IANS
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