The New York Times has dropped a bombshell on ActBlue.
It sure looks like they lied to Congress, which is a crime, in order to cover up the loopholes they created to prevent foreign donations to political candidates, which is a crime.
Story here: https://t.co/dtZXVgZ7ms
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) April 2, 2026
I am SHOCKED, SHOCKED to discover there is gambling in Casablanca.
In early 2025, a law firm working for ActBlue, the Democratic fund-raising behemoth, delivered the organization a startling warning.
The firm concluded that ActBlue’s chief executive had given a potentially misleading response to congressional Republican investigators in a 2023 letter explaining how the organization vetted donations to ensure that they were not illegally coming from foreign citizens.
The letter from the chief executive, Regina Wallace-Jones, said ActBlue carried out “multilayered” screenings of contributions that helped “root out” those from overseas. In fact, the law firm found, some of the steps she had described were not always followed.
“This presents a substantial risk for ActBlue,” the law firm, Covington & Burling, wrote in one of two memos expressing legal concerns. One memo raised the specter of a criminal investigation if prosecutors believed that ActBlue had tried to conceal facts about its efforts to prevent foreign contributions.
It’s nice to see the Times doing some real journalism. It looks like they put a lot of work into the piece. “This article is based on internal legal memos, emails, resignation letters, Slack messages, and interviews with current and former ActBlue employees,” the story’s head notes.
For years, there have been allegations that ActBlue has been funneling foreign donations and enabling smurfing (using straw donors to make illegal donations look legal) to Democratic Party candidates, in addition to providing money laundering to foreign governments and agents to fund anti-American causes.
Those allegations are true, but difficult to prove because financial crimes always are, given how easy it is to move money around, and how sophisticated the operations are. It takes years to build white-collar crime cases when the offenders are sophisticated, and that only happens when the powers that be want to invest the time, effort, and money to make those cases. Obviously, Democrats like that ActBlue can funnel billions into their coffers.
The memos instigated a meltdown at the highest levels of ActBlue, one of the Democratic Party’s most vital financial organs.
A series of top officials resigned in quick succession. The New York Times revealed those departures last year, but a key cause of the tumult at ActBlue — the legal warnings about potentially misleading Congress over vetting foreign donations — is being reported here for the first time.
ActBlue is now all but declaring war on its own past lawyers, an extraordinary turn of events at a moment when President Trump has already ordered a Justice Department investigation into the organization. Democrats are nervous that any additional upheaval at ActBlue could destabilize the party’s critical fund-raising apparatus ahead of the midterm elections.
I wrote about the turmoil at ActBlue a year ago, based on earlier reporting from Shane Goldmacher.
There is a lot happening inside ActBlue. @reidepstein and I report on the “alarming pattern” of senior-level departures and an internal message from a lawyer — posted and deleted — saying they have “whistleblower protections for a reason.”https://t.co/awokfdyAbU
— Shane Goldmacher (@ShaneGoldmacher) March 5, 2025
Lots of rats were scurrying to leave the ship because they had been warned by their lawyers of legal jeopardy.
At issue are the loopholes ActBlue created to facilitate foreign donations, and in particular the fact that ActBlue’s president misled Congress when she claimed that ActBlue had layers of checks and balances that prevented foreigners from using its platform to funnel money to Democrats. The latter pretty much proves that the loopholes were known and hidden.
ActBlue is under the most intense scrutiny it has ever faced.
The Justice Department investigation that Mr. Trump ordered last April — which is in part examining the organization’s systems to prevent contributions from foreign nationals — remains ongoing.
The Covington memos did not state explicitly that ActBlue broke federal law or that Ms. Wallace-Jones misled Congress, but instead explained the risks of her previous statement to Congress.
“It can be alleged that ActBlue accepted and/or facilitated the acceptance of foreign-national contributions into American elections,” one memo states. “In addition, because ActBlue’s staff was aware that its system was not as robust as necessary, it could be alleged that these violations were ‘knowing and willful,’ a standard that both increases the penalties the F.E.C. might seek and gives the Justice Department jurisdiction for a potential criminal investigation.”
What did ActBlue do when it was warned about the potential for criminal liability? It fired its lawyers.
In a tense video conference days after the memos were delivered, Dana Remus, a Covington lawyer who served as White House counsel in the Biden administration, warned Ms. Wallace-Jones that she was at risk of having legal liability and needed her own personal lawyer, according to two people who were on the call.
Within weeks, ActBlue and Covington parted ways.
Now, ActBlue is questioning the legal counsel provided by Covington, a major firm home to high-profile Democratic lawyers. The fund-raising organization says the firm insufficiently reviewed the 2023 letter to Congress — even as it insists that the letter was accurate.
“The statements in my 2023 letter to the House Administration Committee were accurate in the context in which they were written,” Ms. Wallace-Jones said in a written statement to The Times, noting that Covington had approved the letter. Still, ActBlue later took quiet steps to strengthen its efforts to block foreign donations, and conveyed word of its new policies in an unrelated letter its current lawyers sent to Congress in mid-2025.
That came after Ms. Wallace-Jones said that ActBlue had “terminated” Covington in March 2025 after “more than a year of navigating tardiness, unpreparedness, and counsel that bordered on malpractice.”
A Covington spokesman, David Schaefer, said, “We have complete confidence in the legal advice our lawyers provided to ActBlue.” He declined to address ActBlue’s specific claims.
Legal Alarms Start to Blare
The remarkable turmoil at ActBlue was years in the making.
It began with the 2023 letter to Congress, which Ms. Wallace-Jones sent to Republicans on the House Administration Committee as they ramped up an investigation into the platform’s efforts to prevent foreign donations.
ActBlue was lawyering up for the coming fight and brought on Covington for its expertise.
The letter from Ms. Wallace-Jones gave detailed descriptions about ActBlue’s vetting. She wrote that the organization processed contributions with foreign mailing addresses only if the donor supplied a U.S. passport number.
That turned out not to be entirely accurate, Covington’s 2025 memos said.
She also wrote that in some instances, ActBlue would contact donors to request their U.S. passport information in order to process donations — and that it would refund those who could not be reached.
That also did not always happen, according to Covington’s memos. For example, donors who paid through third-party apps like Apple Pay, PayPal or Venmo were not asked for passport information, Covington wrote.
The Covington memos indicated that ActBlue did not have the rigor in its review of overseas donations that was required or that it had described to congressional investigators. As a result, one memo said, there was “a substantial risk that some of the funds received were impermissible contributions from foreign nationals.”
ActBlue’s criminal activities in laundering foreign donations will be very hard to prove, because following the money is, itself, very difficult. In fact, I suspect that direct donations from overseas are a drop in the bucket compared to the smurfing operations that are evident.
!!! Turning off foreign donations wasn’t the only thing ActBlue was lying about. I called it back in 2024, when they told congress they had disabled donations from untraceable gift cards.
The only problem? I donated on ActBlue with a gift card AFTER they supposedly did this. https://t.co/9ripR5pSN4 pic.twitter.com/2XlD92soHZ
— Parker Thayer (@ParkerThayer) April 2, 2026
US citizens have had their identities stolen and used to funnel tens of thousands of dollars to candidates without the victims even knowing, as has been demonstrated many times, as citizen journalists discover people who are shocked to find their names attached to donations they never made.
It’s trivially easy to find massive, repeated donations to ActBlue that use stolen identities and, quite possibly, stolen credit cards.
For example, one person in Virginia has been named in 22,619 separate donations since 2019, totaling more than $800,000. Obviously, she’s being… https://t.co/YHhp5ATaum
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) July 26, 2024
t’s trivially easy to find massive, repeated donations to ActBlue that use stolen identities and, quite possibly, stolen credit cards.For example, one person in Virginia has been named in 22,619 separate donations since 2019, totaling more than $800,000. Obviously, she’s being exploited for some kind of money-laundering operation.ActBlue raises from all fifty states. We have fifty state AGs. When will one of them take action?
Ghost donor problem. Data thanks to the esteemed @PeterBernegger
One Virginia donor. 22,619 transactions totaling $839,466.00. $37.11 average donation.
This donor probably donated to one thing once, with the rest being identity theft by an unknown actor. pic.twitter.com/7wVAUbQOch
— Virginia Project (@ProjectVirginia) March 7, 2024
The smurfing problem is huge, but proving that ActBlue itself was committing the crime would be difficult. It was acting as a platform, and the “bad actors” are third parties, they could argue.
But lying to Congress and purposely creating loopholes for foreign donors is much easier to prove. Which is why ActBlue never panicked when people demonstrated clear acts of smurfing, and why they are panicking now and attacking their former lawyers at Covington.
Is ActBlue toast? It’s hard to believe that the Democrats will let it go into that good night easily. It is their financial lifeline. It is the tool they used to funnel money from USAID to NGOs to Democratic Party candidates. It is how they raise those extraordinary sums for campaigns, outspending Republicans.
At least it was. The death of USAID has already crippled them. Now ActBlue?
Perhaps this is why the Democrats are willing to go to almost any lengths to harm Donald Trump. He presents an existential threat to their party. They are willing to leave Homeland Security unfunded during a war. They are willing to lose a war and have Americans die in the Middle East. That seems bizarre until you realize that the war they are fighting is for their own survival.
Cornered rats are very dangerous.
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