Tag: superpacs

Trump DOJ Opens Investigation Into Texas Democrat PAC After Operative Caught on Tape Bragging About a “Roundabout” Way of “Paying People” for Votes

The Justice Department has opened an investigation into Texas Majority PAC after a viral undercover video showed a since-fired organizing manager spelling out what he called a “roundabout way of paying people for their votes” ahead of the midterms.

A source familiar confirmed the probe on Wednesday. The investigation was first reported by Fox News Digital, which said two sources familiar with the matter confirmed the department is looking at the Democrat operation that dumps millions into flipping Texas blue.

The footage that forced the feds’ hand was released by Townhall on September 16. Sky McAdams, then an organizing manager for Texas Majority PAC, sat down with an undercover journalist and walked through the loophole he said the group uses to skirt federal election law while boosting Democrat U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico.

“We are paying people $25 to attend a one-hour Zoom class to learn why voting is important and why the Republicans are causing all of these bad things,” McAdams said on the tape. “So it’s like a roundabout way of paying people for their votes, essentially.”

He did not stop there. McAdams told the undercover reporter you cannot hand someone cash and say, “Here’s $25, go vote for me.” What you can do, he said, is pay them to sit through a class. “And then the class just talks about the importance of… It’s a little gray.”

He named the program. “It’s called the Paid Relational Program.” He added that he thought “Rally Texas” was the official name. Then he said the quiet part out loud: “If I was a Republican, I would be pissed. I would be like, that’s shady as f**k.”

The Gateway Pundit reported the tape the day it dropped. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Republican Talarico is trying to beat, did not mince words.

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All 10 ActBlue Witnesses Take The Fifth As GOP Says Probe Is “Far From Over”

All ten ActBlue employees and board members deposed by House investigators have invoked the Fifth Amendment rather than answer questions about the Democratic Party’s dominant fundraising platform. Five of the ten are board members, all deposed in the past five weeks, and the three committees running the probe say they are not done. Their third report, released last week, alleged ActBlue accepted a substantial volume of foreign and fraudulent donations with minimal scrutiny.

The investigation’s third report, released last week, alleged ActBlue accepted a substantial volume of foreign and fraudulent donations with minimal scrutiny.

It builds on the first report, released in April 2025, which found that ActBlue skipped standard verification steps such as CVV checks, identified at least 22 significant fraud campaigns, and documented 237 prepaid-card donations from foreign IP addresses in a single month before the 2024 election.

Investigators found that skipping those checks opened the door to smurfing, the practice of dressing up one illegal mega-donation as a parade of small contributions filed under real people’s names. ActBlue’s much-touted “passport verification” process appears to have checked nothing against any government database. Fraud analysts inside the company faced pressure to wave through foreign-flagged donations, in one case clearing a donor on the strength of a LinkedIn profile.

House Oversight, House Administration, and House Judiciary are still working the case now, and none of them show signs of backing off. “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,” Oversight Chairman Rep. James Comer told Fox News Digital. “Our investigation into ActBlue is far from over. We expect more documents and testimony in the weeks ahead.”

Republicans have complained about ActBlue’s verification standards for years, and the company insists it has tightened those safeguards since the investigation began. That claim falls apart against the committees’ own findings. The report says ActBlue took “a more lenient approach” to fraud prevention in 2024, after Steil first questioned its practices in October 2023, and the internal records released last week show employees approving donations despite unresolved red flags about the money’s origins.

ActBlue still denies wrongdoing and has given no indication it plans to return any flagged contribution.

“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,” Committee on House Administration Chairman Rep. Bryan Steil told Fox News Digital on Friday. “All options are on the table to ensure we get to the bottom of what is going on at ActBlue.”

A spokesperson for Judiciary Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan confirmed to Fox News Digital that the panel “will continue aggressive oversight of ActBlue, including additional depositions.”

Co-founder Matt DeBergalis was among the ten who took the Fifth, and CEO Regina Wallace-Jones did the same during a public hearing. In a letter to Steil cited by the report, she claimed donors with non-U.S. addresses must submit a passport number to get verified. The GOP report picked that claim apart, noting the system only confirms the number contains the right count of characters, not that it belongs to an actual passport.

In one internal ActBlue memo, a donation with a Hong Kong IP address was described as a “great accept,” reasoning that none of the donor’s other signals raised eyebrows. Another argued a previously denied contribution should have gone through because the name, email, and billing address all lined up, even though it was a foreign contribution. A supervisor waved through a donation that had set off a lot of alarms because the donor deserved the benefit of the doubt. In one case involving a Missouri billing address with every sign pointing to Canada, an analyst approved the donation because “Twitter seems to confirm that they are a real person.”

Now the National Republican Congressional Committee wants House Democrats to cut ties with ActBlue. “House Democrats cannot claim ignorance while continuing to rely on a fundraising platform facing serious allegations,” NRCC spokesman Mike Marinella said. “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.” Asked whether it would return any donations, ActBlue pointed back to its own statement instead of answering the question.

“There’s nothing to see here,” ActBlue said, arguing a third-party forensic analysis had undercut a central GOP claim and accusing Republicans of “orchestrating another political stunt before rushing out of town weeks early to go campaign.” That review of ActBlue’s 2023 data found 99.99% of contribution dollars came from donors who gave a U.S. address or a passport number, according to the company’s release, though it did not test whether either was genuine. The company framed the entire affair as an effort “to silence organizations they believe threaten their agenda.”

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Ukraine Interfering in US Elections

Ukraine has dark-money PACS targeting anyone they view as against perpetual war. They are now targeting Anna Paulina Luna since she voted against the Russia Sanctions bill. Just like Israel, which interferes so in our elections and poured a ton of money to defeat Massie, Ukraine is doing that to Luna.

Quite frankly, I am sick of this foreign interference to keep fleecing America to fund their endless wars. Luna voted against the Russian sanctions bill that made no sense when you are trying to cut a peace deal. It did give Trump power over tariffs. The Democrats wanted the sanctions so the Republicans stuffed in the tariffs. That was the compromise.

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“Dead To Rights”: Internal ActBlue Records Show Foreign-Flagged Donations Waved Through, Whistleblower Messages Deleted

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.

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Elon Musk PAC Steps Up with Big Bucks to Fund Key Swing-State Races

With the midterm elections less than two months away, Elon Musk’s America PAC is funneling money into Maine congressional races to help maintain GOP control.

Musk’s PAC has dedicated $170,000 to ads, phone calls, mailers, and text messages supporting GOP Sen. Susan Collins, who is running against Democrat Troy Jackson, according to The Center Square.

Collins’ seat is crucial for Republicans and could determine which party controls the upper chamber for the final two years of Trump’s presidency. Republicans currently hold a 53-47 seat majority but have little room for error, given the Senate map.

Initially, Collins’ seat was thought to be safe after her original challenger Graham Platner was marred by scandal.

When he dropped out of the race in July, however, Jackson took his place and gave Democrats a fighting chance.

Platner was initially hailed as a populist hero and was able to survive revelations about a Nazi tattoo on his chest, offensive social media posts, infidelity, and allegations of abuse against former girlfriends.

The straw that broke the camel’s back came when he was accused of rape by Maine Democrat Jenny Racicot.

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Another ActBlue Official Pleads Fifth In House Probe of Alleged Foreign Donations

Another senior figure at Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue invoked the Fifth Amendment during congressional testimony Tuesday as House Republicans investigate allegations of fraudulent and foreign political donations.

Kimberly Peeler-Allen, a member of ActBlue’s board of directors, invoked her constitutional right against self-incrimination while appearing before the House Administration, Judiciary and Oversight committees, according to sources familiar with her testimony.

Her decision follows similar moves by other ActBlue officials.

ActBlue co-founder Matt DeBergalis invoked the Fifth during a closed-door deposition Aug. 20, while CEO Regina Wallace-Jones asserted the same right during congressional questioning in June.

The House Administration Committee began investigating ActBlue in 2023 following concerns that the fundraising platform’s fraud-prevention procedures were inadequate to prevent illegal foreign donations.

Committee Chairman Bryan Steil, R-Wis., has focused in part on ActBlue’s previous practice of not requiring donors to provide credit card CVV security codes.

“We have an entity here with ActBlue, that has raised roughly $20 billion since its creation,” Steil told Fox News.

“We want to make sure that they have the fraud prevention protocols in place to make sure that foreign funds are not coming into U.S. elections.”

Steil acknowledged that witnesses have a constitutional right to invoke the Fifth Amendment but said their refusal to answer questions has frustrated lawmakers seeking information about ActBlue’s operations.

The investigation intensified after The New York Times reported in April that ActBlue’s attorneys had warned internally that Wallace-Jones may have provided Congress with a misleading description of the organization’s procedures for detecting foreign donations.

Wallace-Jones had described ActBlue’s screening system as “multilayered.” According to the Times, however, the organization’s attorneys warned that ActBlue did not always follow the procedures she described, creating what they characterized as “a substantial risk for ActBlue.”

Republicans have denied accusations that the investigation is politically motivated, arguing that foreign money entering American elections would present a serious threat regardless of which party benefits.

ActBlue has denied wrongdoing and has previously said it maintains safeguards against fraudulent and foreign contributions.

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NYT Killed A Story That Exposed How Democratic Spam PACs Drain Elderly Donors — And A Stanford Professor Had To Publish It Himself

You might remember that eight months ago, Stanford University political science professor Adam Bonica spent that time collaborating with The New York Times to run a massive, data-driven expose on the how Democratic spam PACs targeted and bilked elderly donors of their cash. And in the end, The New York Times killed the story after the Elias Law Firm (DCCC/DSCC lawyers) contacted The Times.

Using Federal Election Commission (FEC) data on contributions to Democratic PACs and voter registration lists with age information covering over 300 million contributions to candidates and PACs, Bonica found that the vast majority of donors to Democratic spam PACs are elderly. In fact, a surprisingly concentrated group of elderly donors are responsible for the lion’s share of money raised by these groups.

1% of Democratic donors – approximately 138,000 donors with an average age of 75 – are responsible for more than 49% of $1.4 billion raised by “spam PACs” since 2017.

These are actual cases of senior citizens being taken advantage of by Democratic spam PACs, all while consultants rake in millions. For example, an 85-year-old retired man from Oxford, Ohio sent out 7,800 donations to Democratic groups totaling $648,000 in value. That is more than double the value of his home. An elderly woman from an assisted living center in Indianapolis made 25,000 donations totaling $250,000 in value. The money she was spending on these donations was for her own care. A 93-year-old man was charged 4,208 times over the course of four months for Democratic groups, an average of 31 times per day. That came out to $32,742.

Between 70 and 85 percent of the largest spam PACs’ Facebook/Facebook fundraising ad impressions were served to users 65 and older – a demographic that comprises just 14% of the total adult user base on the platform.

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Wary Of Backlash, Pro-Israel GOP Senate Hopeful Asks AIPAC Not To Spend On His Behalf

With Israel’s standing in the United States crumbling, America’s leading pro-Israel organization has become a focal point of anger among those who think the US government is putting Israel’s interests ahead of America’s. Political candidates have started seizing on this, attacking opponents who are backed by that group — AIPAC. So for, that’s largely been a phenomenon in the Democratic primaries, but now — in a jarring indication of AIPAC’s ballot-box toxicity — staunchly pro-Israel GOP Senate hopeful Mike Rogers has asked AIPAC not to spend money on his general election campaign.  

Rogers, a former US representative who chaired the House intelligence committee from 2011 to 2015, has been a stalwart backer of US aid to Israel, and was one of 12 federal legislators honored in 2015 by the US-Israel Security Alliance for his work to arm the Israel Defense Forces. 

Having won the Republican primary, Rogers faces Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed in the general election. El-Sayed is an outspoken critic of Israel and US support for Israel, which is why AIPAC blew through $30 million in a failed attempt to secure the Democratic nomination for the Israel-catering Haley Stevens. In that campaign, El-Sayed deftly portrayed Stevens as beholden to Israel. Stevens had given him all the ammo he needed; indeed, the El-Sayed campaign created a website that did nothing but show this cringy Stevens performance on a continuous loop.

When his primary victory was nearly in hand, El-Sayed taunted AIPAC, saying, “AIPAC, if you’re listening, come back and burn it again” in the general election. AIPAC was poised to start running an already-produced commercial for the November race when Rogers talked to AIPAC chair Michael Tuchin in Los Angeles last week, Axios reports. The next day, the commercial was put on ice. 

The extraordinary move by the Rogers campaign is a humiliation for AIPAC, which has long been nearly omnipotent in securing lopsided congressional votes on pro-Israel bills, and in installing pro-Israel legislators while ousting those who dare to offer even mild criticism of Israel. While AIPAC has hit “pause” on its effort in the Michigan Senate campaign, angry AIPAC officials want back in. 

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AOC and Bernie Sanders Are Still Taking ActBlue Money After an 88-Year-Old Said She Donated $150,000 From a Trailer With No Computer

ActBlue’s own CEO sat before Congress in June and invoked the Fifth Amendment 22 times.

The platform – the financial backbone of every major Democrat campaign in America – just got caught with a new donor who says her name was used for more than 16,000 contributions she didn’t make.

And AOC, Bernie Sanders, and Ilhan Omar are still cashing the checks from ActBlue.

An 88-Year-Old Woman Living in a Trailer Has 16,000 Donations in Her Name

Elizabeth Waffle is 88 years old.

She lives in a trailer down a dirt road in Milan, Michigan, after her house burned down two years ago.

She has no computer.

She has spotty internet service.

Federal Election Commission records say she has made more than 16,000 political contributions totaling nearly $150,000 through ActBlue since 2020.

That’s eight donations a day, every day, for five years straight – averaging $9.18 a pop.

“One hundred and fifty thousand? Hell no, I don’t have that kind of money,” Waffle told reporter Charlie LeDuff of the Michigan Enjoyer in a now-viral video.

She acknowledged making small donations through ActBlue – she disputed the $150,000.

“I don’t see $150,000,” she said. “That’s very abnormal and I think it’s wrong. I think there’s something in there that’s off.”

ActBlue responded by saying it had “zero tolerance for fraud.”

Then it kept processing donations for AOC, Bernie Sanders, Ilhan Omar, and the Democratic National Committee.

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ActBlue Co-Founder Pleads the Fifth During Closed-Door Meeting

The co-founder of the Democrat fundraising powerhouse ActBlue invoked his Fifth Amendment right during a deposition with three key House Committees, according to sources reported by FOX News.

Matt DeBergalis was in and out in under thirty minutes this morning during a deposition with the committees on House Administration, Oversight, and the Judiciary.  The deposition was reportedly over lax fraud prevention standards which may have allowed foreign donations to seep through their filters and into U.S. campaigns.

According to InfluenceWatch.org, DeBergalis is an MIT graduate who created ActBlue in 2004 after a failed bid for city council.

Influence Watch cited a 2007 interview where DeBergalis described ActBlue:

The whole thing is built around using existing social networks: whether they are coworkers asking each other to do things, friends, or existing communities built around e-mail lists or blogs. But we aren’t trying to direct people to give money to any particular place, we’re just trying to facilitate connections that already exist. Our feeling is that everyone has some sphere of influence and that set of people will respond to appeals from a person far more actively and frequently than they will to a top down national advertising campaign. We’re just trying to harness that.

Originally, ActBlue would list every Democrat running for office in a state where ActBlue was active. A user would select which Democrats they wanted to support. The fundraiser would use their social circles and encourage people to donate to that candidate. ActBlue would process the credit card and send the money directly to the candidate or organization. 3

DeBergalis saw ActBlue as a counter to the traditional Republican advantage in direct-mail fundraising, saying, “The other big tool however has been direct mail — it works particularly well for the Republicans, they’ve always had a large advantage in direct fundraising by mail. ActBlue is a nice counter-example: our model, where everyone can use their own language and own pitch for why they’re supporting a candidate, actually works better for the democratic party than for a republican party.” 3

Last month, The Gateway Pundit reported that ActBlue and the DNC allegedly funneled millions through payroll firm Rippling taken from unwitting employees.  The total accounted for approximately $23.3 million in payroll expenditures processed by the DNC.

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