Before the recent election, the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability asked then-Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to turn over all Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) relating to ActBlue — not much happened. An SAR is a document that banks file with the Treasury Department pursuant to potentially fraudulent or illicit financial activity. Yellen stalled, presumably in the hope that the Democrats would win the House back in November and halt the investigation. That obviously didn’t happen and the new Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent, is of course cooperating with the committee.
ActBlue will not survive the light that the House committee and nineteen state attorneys general are determined to shine on it.
This may well be what precipitated the sudden departure of seven senior officials from ActBlue in February. The New York Times reports that the exodus included “the associate general counsel — who was the highest-ranking legal officer at ActBlue — the assistant research director, a human resources official, the chief revenue officer and an engineer who had spent 16 years building and maintaining the electronic pipes through which the group’s donations flow.” These “electronic pipes” are clearly of particular interest to the Chairman of the Oversight and Accountability Committee, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), who included the following forewarning in his letter to erstwhile Treasury Secretary Yellen:
Recent reports have raised the specter of fraud and evasion of campaign finance law by individuals exploiting online contribution platforms, especially ActBlue. For example, ActBlue had not implemented standard procedures to guard against identity theft and fraud such as requiring a Card Verification Value (CVV) to process online transactions until it received criticism for not doing so. ActBlue is also being investigated by several states’ officials in relation to contributions allegedly made via the platform fraudulently without the reported contributor’s awareness.
This practice is known as “smurfing.” It is a type of identity theft whereby the names of small dollar donors are repeatedly used without their knowledge to mask large dollar political contributions that by law must be reported to the Federal Election Commission (FEC). The website Election Watch features a “Smurf Search” tool that allows users to search FEC data for implausibly large numbers of political contributions attributed to individual donors. For example, a close examination of the data indicates that one Colorado resident allegedly made 57,138 contributions under 5 aliases — over a period of 6 years and 2 months — totaling $234,441.
And this is by no means an outlier. The FEC data shows a Florida resident who purportedly made 52,591 contributions under 14 aliases — over a period of 3 years and 1 month — totaling $387,720. One California resident listed has supposedly made 52,501 separate contributions under 9 aliases — over a period of 5 years and 10 months — totaling $884,152. The list goes on and on. There are quite literally thousands of examples with similarly implausible contribution patterns. Thus, 19 states have opened investigations into the finances of ActBlue. The following is an excerpt of a letter the state attorneys general sent to its President and CEO, Regina Wallace-Jones.
Recent reporting suggests that that there may be donors across the country who are identified in filings with the Federal Election Commission as having donated to candidates through ActBlue (and other affiliated entities), but who did not actually make those donations. That raises a host of concerns about whether ActBlue’s platform is being used to facilitate “smurfing” — a type of money laundering in which donors break up large donations and submit them under different names to disguise who the money comes from and thereby skirt contribution limits.
None of this should surprise any student of Democratic fundraising tactics. As far back as March of 2023, independent journalist James O’Keefe looked into ActBlue and interviewed a number of the people this fundraising organization reported to the FEC as high volume, low dollar contributors. He subsequently posted this X video substantiating the results. He knocks on doors, speaks directly to alleged donors and receives responses ranging from doors slamming in his face to curious citizens simply answering his questions. The latter emphatically deny donating money in the amounts or with the frequency reported by ActBlue to the FEC in their names.
ActBlue’s Source of Money
All of which inevitably brings us to the following question: What is the source of the large contributions that ActBlue is suspected of laundering by means of identity theft and credit card fraud? We aren’t talking chump change here. ActBlue has raised about $16 billion for the Democratic Party and other far left organizations since it was founded in 2004. According to Open Secrets, it raised more than $3.8 billion during the recent election cycle, well over $3.7 billion of which allegedly arrived in the form of “small dollar” donations. Is it plausible that ActBlue received that kind of money from people worried about the price of eggs?
The most likely source of its funding is, and always was, a combination of far left billionaires such as George Soros, Reid Hoffman, Herbert Sandler, Patricia Bauman, et al. ActBlue will not survive the light that the House committee and nineteen state attorneys general are determined to shine on it. That’s why its senior officials bailed, leaving the rank-and-file activists holding all that dirty money. If ActBlue goes belly up, who will do the laundry for the Democratic Party?
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