The Democratic Party's premier fundraising machine is in serious legal jeopardy, and the new man running the Justice Department just made clear he intends to do something about it.
The New York Times reported on Thursday that ActBlue’s own lawyers had warned its leadership in early 2025 that it may have lied to Congress about how it screens out illegal foreign donations.
In 2023, ActBlue CEO Regina Wallace-Jones sent a letter to Republican congressional investigators assuring them the platform used rigorous safeguards. The letter described "multilayered" screenings that helped "root out" overseas contributions. What the platform's own legal team later discovered was considerably more inconvenient: those protections weren't consistently applied in practice.
“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.
Federal election law prohibits foreign citizens or people who are not permanent residents from donating directly to federal candidates or political action committees. Lying to or obstructing Congress is a crime.
The memos instigated a meltdown at the highest levels of ActBlue, one of the Democratic Party’s most vital financial organs.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, freshly installed at the helm of the DOJ after Pam Bondi's departure, went on Jesse Watters' Fox News show Thursday and left little ambiguity about where this investigation stands.
“I can tell you that that is a priority of this administration and this Department of Justice,” Blanche said. “And it's something that a lot of people have been worried about it for a very long time. And you should rest assured that it includes the Department of Justice, and it includes me."
The New York Post added fuel to the fire with a separate exclusive, revealing that ActBlue changed its fraud prevention policy twice during the 2024 campaign cycle — both times in a more permissive direction. The platform modified standards in April 2024 and again in September, with the relaxed guidelines allowing more fraudulent contributions per month to slip through. Under the updated policy, up to 6.4% of total ActBlue donations that should have been rejected for fraud were instead processed without issue.
Foreign donors who paid through third-party apps like Apple Pay, PayPal, or Venmo were not asked for passport information — a significant gap in a system that ActBlue had represented to Congress as comprehensive and multi-tiered. The platform sent a follow-up letter to Congress in June 2025, claiming it had "recently implemented additional restrictions" to reject contributions from foreign countries, including those made through third-party processors.
“Did Democrats use ActBlue to funnel foreign money in American elections and then LIE to Congress about it?” Sen. Bernie Moreno asked in a post on X. “The Senate must immediately renew investigations into ActBlue, their lawyers, and their entire leadership team.”
ActBlue board chair Kimberly Peeler-Allen attempted to tamp down the story, telling the Times that "less than 1 percent" of contributions in the 2024 cycle showed signs of foreign origin. That number, however small it may sound, represents potentially millions of dollars on a platform that processed over $7 billion in the past five years. A Covington spokesman said the firm has "complete confidence in the legal advice our lawyers provided to ActBlue" — a carefully worded non-denial that speaks volumes about the legal exposure now facing the organization.
In addition to the Department of Justice, the House Oversight Committee revealed that congressional investigations into ActBlue will continue.
With DOJ scrutiny and congressional Republican probes accelerating ahead of the midterms, ActBlue is running out of runway.