Tag: superpacs

“Democrats for Mike Rogers” PAC Is Funded by Republicans, Records Show

Democrats for Mike Rogers, a group that has spent millions of dollars to defeat Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, has received funds from Republican-aligned organizations, campaign finance records show.

Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings, made public on October 16, revealed that TFM, a super PAC that has been running commercials against El-Sayed under the “Democrats for Mike Rogers” name, was funded by two other PACs that back Republican candidates.

GLCF, a pro-Rogers group, gave TFM $50,000, while American Unity PAC, whose stated mission is to promote “Republicans who support LGBT freedom,” transferred $25,000 to the Michigan group.

Other donors include three individuals in Tennessee and one Michigan resident.

The name and place of residence of the Michigan donor — Michael Sandler, of West Bloomfield — matches those of a doctor who was appointed to the Central Michigan University board of trustees in 2017 by then-Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican.

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Musk donates $276M to GOP in massive midterms push, marking largest political donation in U.S. history

Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX and the wealthiest person in the world, has reportedly contributed $276 million to Republican political groups since July, according to a spokesperson.

America PAC is a political action committee founded by Musk in 2024 to support Republican candidates and conservative ballot initiatives. Powered by hundreds of millions of dollars in personal funding from Musk, the organization focuses primarily on large-scale voter canvassing and targeted digital media campaigns.

Ahead of the midterms, Musk is the largest known donor, contributing $158 million to the Senate Leadership Fund this summer. The donation ranks among the largest political contributions in United States history, as first reported by The New York Times and later confirmed by Andrew Romeo, a spokesperson for Musk’s super PAC.

After pouring more than $76 million into America PAC this summer, Musk saw those funds directed into a sprawling canvassing program targeting hard-to-reach Republican voters.

  • $20 million to the Congressional Leadership Fund, the main super PAC for House Republicans
  • $10 million to Lone Star Liberty PAC, a group supporting Texas GOP Senate hopeful Ken Paxton (R-Texas.)
  • $10 million to the Republican Governors Association
  • $2 million to the Republican Attorneys General Association

The massive spending marks a sharp reversal from last May, when Musk said he planned to scale back his political contributions, stating, “I think I’ve done enough.”

The Tesla CEO’s substantial financial contributions exemplify his support for President Donald Trump and Republican candidates in the midterms. His super PAC has also confirmed plans to remain active in the 2028 presidential race, positioning Musk to continue playing a major role in Republican politics.

Musk’s massive donation follows President Trump awarding the National Medal of Science to Musk and other tech executives on Thursday.

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DOJ Hits Gallego’s PAC with Grand Jury Subpoena in Slush Fund Probe

The Justice Department subpoenaed Sen. Ruben Gallego’s (D-AZ) leadership PAC as part of a federal criminal investigation into the Arizona Democrat’s use of campaign cash to fund a luxurious lifestyle, according to a copy of the subpoena obtained by POLITICO.

The grand jury subpoena went out Aug. 21 to Gallego’s Juntos PAC, POLITICO reported Saturday. Its existence had not been reported before. It sought records tied to “activities on or about” Sept. 9, 2025. It also demanded the statements Gallego gave the Senate Ethics Committee during its own misuse-of-funds probe, the one the panel dismissed in June.

A spokesman for the senator said the PAC turned over everything it was asked for.

“The leadership PAC has complied with and responded to the Trump DOJ subpoena because it has nothing to hide,” spokesman Jacques Petit told the outlet. Petit did not say whether Gallego himself, his family, or any of his staff had also been subpoenaed.

The subpoena states that it relates to an “ongoing criminal investigation” and that the records will be handed to a grand jury. Its deadline was Sept. 4.

The probe grew out of reporting on how the senator spent donor money. POLITICO documented a string of family trips to Disneyland, Disney World, Miami, and Chicago. It also found more than $18,000 in childcare reimbursements since 2019, including $400 that went to his mother-in-law. One source put it bluntly, calling the account his “personal slush fund.”

The record also pulls in disgraced former Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA). The two established a joint committee in October 2022, the “Swallego Victory Fund,” and used it the following year to buy Super Bowl LVII tickets in Glendale, Arizona. CBS News reported the fund burned through more than $37,000 on tickets and meals before being terminated, sending roughly $7,600 to each of their campaigns.

The California Democrat left Congress in April, abandoning a run for governor as multiple women came forward with misconduct accusations. He has denied the allegations.

The subpoena builds on earlier reporting. Breitbart News noted in June that federal prosecutors moved in a day after the Ethics Committee wrapped its inquiry, a sequence the senator’s office dismissed as “politically motivated.” Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) filed the complaint that prompted the Senate ethics inquiry.

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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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