For years, the left has lectured Americans about the dangers of “foreign interference” and dark money in our elections. But a sweeping congressional investigation has laid bare a vast Democratic fundraising apparatus that paved the way for just that: ActBlue, the billion-dollar financial engine of the Democratic Party, created a mechanism that encouraged illicit foreign cash – and then, investigators say, covered it up. Read on.
On Wednesday, House investigators released “Part III” of their bombshell investigation into ActBlue’s fundraising practices. The findings outline a staggering pattern of willful blindness, internal censorship, and a frantic race by executives to plead the Fifth.
Here is how the Democrats’ top fundraising platform built a system that welcomed very questionable cash, and how their own staff tried to bury the evidence.
Step 1: The “Smurfing” Machine
The scandal was officially brought to light in April 2025, when the House GOP released Part I of its staff report. Lawmakers detailed a structural nightmare: ActBlue had intentionally bypassed standard banking security measures, such as requiring CVV verification codes for credit card donations.
That gap is what made “smurfing” plausible – a money-laundering technique in which a large, illegal contribution is chopped into thousands of small donations, each attributed to a real person who, allegedly, never made it. The prepaid cards obscure where the money came from; the borrowed names make it look like a stream of legal small-dollar gifts from ordinary Americans. The donations themselves aren’t hidden – as a conduit, ActBlue itemizes every one in its FEC filings regardless of size, which is how the donor lists cited below were compiled. The question is whether anyone at ActBlue was checking whose names were being used.
The allegation itself predates the House probe. It surfaced in March 2023, when James O’Keefe’s O’Keefe Media Group – working from FEC-record analysis compiled by Peter Bernegger’s Election Watch – published videos of elderly donors listed in federal filings for thousands of small ActBlue contributions far beyond anything they said they’d given. Sen. Ron Johnson wrote the FEC in April 2023; Chairman Steil’s committee ran its own analysis of FEC records and in September 2024 referred its findings to five state attorneys general, citing anomalous donor profiles consistent with unwitting “straw donors”; President Trump’s April 2025 memorandum directed DOJ to investigate “straw” and “dummy” donations. ActBlue calls the inquiry politically motivated. The House reports don’t settle it. What they document is that ActBlue’s own records show at least 22 significant fraud campaigns, account takeovers used to make straw donations that appeared to come from regular donors, and 237 prepaid-card donations from foreign IP addresses in a single month before the 2024 election – and that when investigators asked former Associate General Counsel Aaron Ting under oath whether smurfing is prevalent on ActBlue, he took the Fifth.
Step 2: The Cover-Up and the Fifth Amendment
When ActBlue’s own legal and compliance teams realized the potential scale of illicit foreign donations flowing through the platform, panic set in. But instead of correcting the record with Congress, as its own lawyers advised, the execs allegedly moved to suppress the findings, as outlined in the committee’s Part II report.
Internal records show what happened to the last lawyer who escalated the foreign-donation problem. After the 2024 election, ActBlue’s outside counsel had warned the company in two memoranda that its screening of overseas contributions lacked the rigor it had described to Congress, and that its November 2023 letter to Chairman Steil may have been false or misleading. On February 25, 2025 – his first full day running the legal department – legal counsel Zain Ahmad put those memoranda in front of ActBlue’s board of directors and executive team.
The silencing began the next day. He was locked out of his email and Google Drive, against ActBlue’s own leave policy. When he objected in a 277-person IT channel – calling it retaliation and citing the company’s whistleblower and anti-retaliation policies – IT director Hanna Bonin deleted the messages as fast as he posted them: his request to restore access, his policy citations, the policies themselves, and finally his plea to “stop deleting my requests,” which vanished five seconds after it went up. Six deletions in one night. An HR staffer told the chief people officer it “look[ed] like blatant retaliation.” When his email came back the next day, HR was discussing how to “key in on him” using the company’s security tools.
Hellbound and Down 