Every ActBlue employee and board member called before Congress invoked the Fifth Amendment rather than answer questions about the Democratic fundraising platform's handling of foreign donations, and House Republicans say the investigation is just getting started.
The House Judiciary Committee released a series of deposition transcripts revealing that all 10 ActBlue employees and board members who sat for closed-door interviews refused to testify, each invoking their constitutional right against self-incrimination. ActBlue co-founder Matt DeBergalis was among them. CEO Regina Wallace-Jones did the same at a public hearing before the House Administration Committee on June 10, titled "Preventing Fraudulent Donations: Transparency, Verification, and Accountability."
Three committee chairmen, James Comer of House Oversight, Bryan Steil of House Administration, and Jim Jordan of House Judiciary, are now coordinating what they describe as an ongoing, multi-front investigation into whether ActBlue accepted illegal foreign contributions and then misled Congress about its safeguards. A staff report compiled by House investigators cites internal ActBlue memos and communications that, if accurate, paint a picture of a platform where supervisors coached employees to find reasons to approve suspect donations rather than reject them.
The staff report includes excerpts from internal ActBlue communications that describe how the platform's fraud prevention team handled flagged transactions. In one memo, a reviewer labeled a donation a "great accept" even though the donor "sometimes has an IP in Hong Kong," because "none of their other signals raise any eyebrows." Fox News Digital did not independently verify the communications excerpts included in the report.
Another memo showed a supervisor overruling a denied contribution, arguing it "should have been accepted" despite being identified as a foreign contribution. The supervisor's reasoning: "the name/email match, the IP/billing match, a full address with the correct country code, and there were previously accepted and successful contributions." The donor had used an Arkansas state code, which the supervisor acknowledged "isn't great" but chalked up to the system being "wonky with requiring state codes for foreign donors."
In a separate case, an employee noted that a donor using a Missouri billing address had "all signs point to this person being from Canada." The employee used the donor's X account, formerly Twitter, to confirm the person's identity, rather than any government verification system.
A supervisor in yet another flagged case acknowledged that a contribution "set off a lot of" alarms but argued the donor should be given the "benefit of the doubt," Fox News Digital reported.
These cases matter because federal law bars foreign nationals from contributing to U.S. political campaigns. A fundraising platform that processes millions of small-dollar donations carries a particular obligation to screen for illegal foreign money, and the memos suggest ActBlue's internal culture leaned toward approval, not scrutiny.
Chairman Steil zeroed in on one of the most striking findings in the report: ActBlue's so-called passport verification system for overseas donors did not actually verify anything against a government database. It checked only whether the entered passport number contained the correct number of characters.
Wallace-Jones had previously written to Steil maintaining that donations from people with addresses outside the United States required a passport number for verification. But the report's findings suggest that "verification" amounted to a format check, not a confirmation that the passport number belonged to a real person or a U.S. citizen.
The gap between what ActBlue told Congress and what its system actually did is central to the investigation. As the Washington Free Beacon detailed, ActBlue's own outside legal counsel at Covington & Burling warned in internal memos that the platform may have misled Congress about its foreign donation vetting. The law firm flagged that passport information was not verified at all for donors using third-party payment apps like Apple Pay or Venmo, a direct contradiction of Wallace-Jones's 2023 testimony that the platform conducted "multilayered" screenings.
Covington's memos went further, warning that "it can be alleged that ActBlue accepted and/or facilitated the acceptance of foreign-national contributions into American elections." The firm cautioned that violations could be deemed "knowing and willful," potentially giving the Department of Justice jurisdiction for a criminal investigation.
The warnings were serious enough that ActBlue's own in-house attorney, Aaron Ting, resigned. In his resignation letter, Ting wrote: "I am concerned that leadership is not fully committed to transparently addressing with the Board the seriousness of our most pressing concerns." That sequence, outside counsel raising alarms, an in-house lawyer walking out the door, and leadership pressing forward, raises its own set of questions about how ActBlue treated the attorneys who flagged the problems.
The congressional investigation has also uncovered evidence that ActBlue changed its fraud prevention policies during the 2024 campaign cycle, and not in the direction of tighter controls. National Review reported that ActBlue adopted what its own internal documents described as "a more lenient approach" to fraud prevention, weakening its policies at least twice. Internal assessments reportedly showed that the policy changes would result in a measurable increase in fraudulent contributions.
Internal training materials directed ActBlue's fraud prevention team to "look for reasons to accept contributions" rather than scrutinize them. That instruction tracks with the memo excerpts in the staff report, where supervisors repeatedly overruled frontline reviewers who had flagged donations as suspicious.
The New York Post reported that at least 237 overseas transactions using prepaid cards were flagged between September and October 2024 alone, originating from countries including Brazil, Colombia, India, Iraq, the Philippines, and Saudi Arabia. Under the relaxed standards, up to 6.4 percent of donations could have come from illicit sources.
House Republicans have previously detailed these allegations about weakened fraud controls in earlier stages of the investigation. The new transcripts and memo excerpts add granular evidence to a pattern that committee chairmen say points toward systemic failure, or deliberate indifference.
Chairman Comer did not mince words in his assessment. In a statement, the Kentucky Republican said:
"Whether it's allowing fraudsters to steal taxpayer dollars or accepting illegal foreign donations through ActBlue, Democrats have proven themselves to be the party of fraud. Our investigation into ActBlue is far from over. We expect more documents and testimony in the weeks ahead."
Steil, the Wisconsin Republican who chairs the House Administration Committee, told Fox News Digital that ActBlue's admissions speak for themselves:
"ActBlue's own admissions raise serious questions about its fraud prevention practices, including a so-called passport verification process that did not actually verify or check entries against any government database. All options are on the table to ensure we get to the bottom of what is going on at ActBlue."
A spokesperson for Jordan's Judiciary Committee confirmed the panel "will continue aggressive oversight of ActBlue, including additional depositions." The breadth of that commitment, three committees, more subpoenas, more depositions, signals that Republicans view ActBlue not as a peripheral issue but as a central front in the fight over election integrity.
The National Republican Congressional Committee went a step further. NRCC spokesman Mike Marinella called on every House Democrat to sever ties with the platform entirely:
"House Democrats cannot claim ignorance while continuing to rely on a fundraising platform facing serious allegations. The [National Republican Congressional Committee] officially calls on every House Democrat to cut ties with ActBlue and return any illegal contributions funneled to their campaigns through the platform."
ActBlue is the dominant small-dollar fundraising engine for Democratic candidates and progressive causes. Politicians from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed use the platform. Cutting ties would be operationally devastating for Democrats, which is precisely why the NRCC's demand carries political weight even if compliance is unlikely.
ActBlue has pushed back forcefully, calling the investigation a coordinated effort to silence organizations that threaten the Republican agenda. In a statement, the company said:
"There's nothing to see here. 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."
The platform added that Republicans "are orchestrating another political stunt before rushing out of town weeks early to go campaign" and that "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."
ActBlue has previously told the committees that "there is no evidence that foreign donations through online or small-dollar contributions are a problem in U.S. elections." Internal employee communications included in the report described the company as "the target of bad-faith political attacks at the hands of ill-intentioned operators." The platform says it has actively improved its verification standards since the investigation began, though the specific improvements are not detailed in the report.
ActBlue did not specify which "central claim" its third-party forensic analysis allegedly undermined, and the identity of the firm that conducted the analysis is not named in available reporting. Campaign finance controversies have not been limited to ActBlue, federal prosecutors have brought charges in other cases involving the misuse of funds in political campaigns.
The Associated Press reported that critics of the investigation, including former FEC attorney Dan Weiner, have argued that foreign money in elections is a legitimate concern but that singling out one platform while ignoring similar issues elsewhere undermines the effort's credibility. AP identified approximately 1,600 potentially problematic donations to Trump's political committees over five years, including contributions from donors living abroad.
That counterpoint does not erase what the ActBlue memos show. If anything, it strengthens the case for rigorous enforcement across the board, which is what the committees say they are pursuing. The question is whether ActBlue's leadership chose to look the other way, and whether telling Congress one thing while doing another crosses the line from negligence into obstruction.
The Fifth Amendment exists to protect individuals from being compelled to incriminate themselves. Invoking it is a constitutional right, not an admission of guilt. But when every single employee and board member called before Congress, all 10 of them, plus the CEO at a public hearing, refuses to answer a single question, the silence itself becomes a data point.
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have drawn inferences from mass Fifth Amendment invocations in past investigations. The pattern here is striking: not one ActBlue witness chose to cooperate, even partially. DeBergalis, who co-founded the platform, said nothing. Wallace-Jones, who runs it, said nothing. The fraud prevention team members who processed the flagged donations said nothing.
Meanwhile, the internal memos say plenty. They describe a system where donors with foreign IP addresses, foreign billing patterns, and foreign social media profiles were approved with minimal scrutiny, sometimes over the objections of the very employees now refusing to testify. The Washington Examiner noted that the concerns about misleading Congress trace back to a 2023 inquiry in which Republicans, including Steil, flagged that ActBlue was not even collecting credit card verification values from donors, a basic fraud prevention step. Broader questions about campaign finance integrity within the Democratic Party continue to mount.
Comer, Steil, and Jordan have all signaled that more depositions, more document demands, and potentially stronger enforcement measures are coming. ActBlue calls it a stunt. Its own lawyers called it a substantial risk. The committees intend to find out which description is closer to the truth.
When your own attorneys warn you may have broken the law, and your response is to plead the Fifth and call the investigation political, that is not transparency. That is a fundraising platform begging the country not to look too closely at where the money came from.
