House GOP report details how Dem fundraising platform ActBlue allowed illegal foreign donations

WASHINGTON — Democratic fundraising powerhouse ActBlue let overseas money illegally flow to US campaigns and causes with barely the appearance of proper vetting, according to a report released this week by three House Republican-led committees.New documents obtained by the House Oversight, Judiciary and Administration Committees revealed that ActBlue’s fraud safeguards, including its methods for passport verification, “could be bypassed easily by foreign actors.”“We use some very basic validation — number of characters — to ensure that the number entered is a valid passport number, but we do not verify the information in any other way,” the report quoted an ActBlue customer service webpage.“We do not, for instance, check the information provided against a government database,” it added.“We merely store the information and continue with the contribution flow.”Policies adopted by the platform also forced its fraud analysts to “give the donor the benefit of the doubt,” even when contributions originated from foreign IP addresses or had other indications of originating outside America.“Donor sometimes has an IP in Hong Kong but none of their other signals raise any eyebrows,” an ActBlue supervisor wrote to an employee urging them to accept a June 2024 contribution.“It’s odd that all signs point to this person being from Canada but they used a Missouri billing address, but Twitter seems to confirm that they are a real person,” read another note from a supervisor on an accepted donation from early 2022.The report also found that “every member of ActBlue’s legal and compliance team appears to have left the platform after the 2024 election because of its ‘knowing and willful’ acceptance of illegal foreign contributions, and the subsequent cover-up.”“There’s nothing to see here,” an ActBlue spokesperson responded in a statement.

“After we released findings of a third-party forensic analysis that completely undermined a...