ActBlue’s sudden passport verification push for overseas donors lands as House Republicans say the move confirms years of weak screening on a platform that has moved billions into Democratic campaigns.
Fox News Digital obtained a Monday letter from attorneys for ActBlue telling the House the group is launching a new “passport verification program” for contributions from donors located abroad.
The change comes days after House GOP investigators accused the Democrats’ largest fundraising platform of potentially taking in foreign money for U.S. campaigns, and after a fresh Republican report alleged the old passport field barely checked anything real.
Committee on House Administration Chairman Bryan Steil, R-Wis., did not treat the letter as a quiet upgrade. He called it proof of the core charge Republicans have pressed for years.
"This decision to implement a NEW passport verification program only confirms what we've been saying: ActBlue failed to verify the citizenship of individuals who made donations from abroad. That's unacceptable."
Steil told Fox News Digital the fix should have existed from the start, and he put the open money question on the table in plain terms.
"This new policy should have been in place on day one. Right now, far too many questions remain unanswered, including what percentage of the billions of dollars that have flowed through ActBlue came from illegal foreign sources. Chairman Jordan, Chairman Comer, and I will continue to seek answers for the American people."
House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and House Oversight Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., are co-leading the probe with Steil. A Jordan spokesperson said the new action undercuts what ActBlue’s CEO told Congress about fraud prevention.
"This action confirms that the platform's fraud prevention measures were not as robust as [ActBlue CEO Regina Wallace-Jones] told Congress. We will continue to demand answers."
ActBlue’s attorneys framed the program as an upgrade to a “multi-layered approach to fraud and foreign-contribution prevention.” The letter said eligible donors abroad can now verify identity with a valid U.S. passport, and that U.S. citizens overseas who have been locked out since 2025 can resume giving.
In the company’s own words, the engineering work is meant to help the system “withstand scrutiny” as it resumes processing contributions from foreign addresses.
That timing matters. Republicans released a report earlier this month, first reported by Fox News Digital, alleging ActBlue employees green-lighted donations even when questions arose about where the money came from. The same report claimed the passport field only ensured an entry had a certain number of characters, not that it was a valid U.S. passport number.
GOP investigators also pointed back to a letter from CEO Regina Wallace-Jones to Steil that said donations from addresses outside the United States required a passport number for verification. The new House report put that claim against the weaker technical picture Republicans described.
Wallace-Jones is already on the congressional record in a way that raises the stakes. She invoked the Fifth Amendment during questioning tied to a House Administration Committee hearing titled “Preventing Fraudulent Donations: Transparency, Verification, and Accountability,” held June 10, 2026, in Washington.
She was not alone. Ten top figures inside the company, including executives and founders, pleaded the Fifth in public and private sit-downs with GOP-led committees. That is a lot of silence from the people who built and ran the machine that filled Democratic coffers.
ActBlue is the main small-dollar pipeline for a wide range of Democratic candidates, including party leaders in the House and Senate. When verification questions hit that pipeline, they hit the party’s entire fundraising model.
Outside counsel raised sharper alarms than ActBlue’s public posture suggests. The Washington Free Beacon reported that attorneys at Covington & Burling warned ActBlue leadership in 2025 that the group may have misled Congress about foreign-donation vetting.
Those memos said passport checks were not applied to Apple Pay and Venmo donations, even after a 2023 congressional letter from Wallace-Jones claimed multilayered safeguards that included U.S. passport numbers for overseas gifts. Covington warned of substantial legal risk, including possible knowing and willful exposure at the Federal Election Commission and the Justice Department.
One memo put the charge in direct language: it can be alleged that ActBlue accepted or facilitated foreign-national contributions, and that staff awareness the system was not robust enough could support “knowing and willful” violations.
The Free Beacon also reported that less than 1% of 2024-cycle contributions showed signs of foreign origin, roughly $38 million of about $3.8 billion processed. Even a small percentage of that volume is real money in American elections. Senior officials, including in-house attorney Aaron Ting, resigned amid the compliance fight. Ting’s resignation letter said he was concerned leadership was not fully committed to addressing past screening practices and past representations to Congress.
ActBlue rejects the Republican case. In a response to Fox News Digital after the earlier report, the group said a third-party forensic analysis “completely undermined a central claim” Republicans made, and accused the GOP of 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."
A company blog post offered a different origin story for the 2025 freeze on overseas money. ActBlue said that in 2025, “amid unprecedented attacks from President Trump and his allies,” it “took the proactive step of temporarily suspending all contributions from outside the United States.” It now says enhanced verification will let eligible Americans abroad with a U.S. passport use the platform again while keeping security standards donors and campaigns expect.
ActBlue also maintains it “accurately described” its vetting process to Congress. House Republicans say the new passport program, the old character-count field, the Fifth Amendment invocations, and the internal legal warnings tell a different story.
Comer has used the Oversight gavel to keep the alleged fraud questions alive, including an update on Fox Across America with guest host Paul Mauro. Steil, Jordan, and Comer have framed the work as unfinished business: how much money moved, under what rules, and with what proof of citizenship.
Federal law bars foreign nationals from funding U.S. elections. Campaign platforms that process small-dollar gifts at massive scale are supposed to catch illegal money before it hits a candidate’s account. If the screen is a character count, that is not a screen. If Apple Pay and Venmo skipped passport checks while Congress heard about multilayered safeguards, that is a credibility problem the public is entitled to hear about.
ActBlue’s letter promises better tools going forward. It does not close the books on what already flowed through the system, or on why so many senior figures refused to answer under oath.
Voters can give to the candidates they support. They cannot be asked to trust a black box that froze overseas donations under pressure, then reinvented passport checks only after House investigators put the old process under a microscope.
