ActBlue is a political action committee (PAC) and fundraising platform that was founded in 2004. Focusing primarily on small-dollar donors, it raised $13.7 billion for Democrats through June of 2024.
Separate House investigations, one ongoing for more than a year and a half, have uncovered evidence that shows ActBlue has been acting a fool.
Last week, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and the House Administration Committee sent a letter seeking information from the Treasury Department to aid their investigations into the PAC's potentially fraudulent and illicit financial activity.
Representative James Comer (R-Kentucky), the Oversight chairman, told The Benny Show's Benny Johnson that he is working with the FBI to pursue criminal charges against certain ActBlue personnel.
As the investigations advance, ActBlue has seen an employee exodus, with at least seven senior officials leaving over the last month.
Two unions representing ActBlue employees wrote to the company's board of directors expressing concerns about the "alarming pattern" of the departures, according to The New York Times.
"The lawyers are leaving the organization. This is rats fleeing a sinking ship," Will Chamberlain, senior counsel for The Article III Project, said on Washington Watch Friday. "We don't know what ActBlue did that was so legally indefensible, but we can be confident they did something legally indefensible."
Comer told Johnson the offense, for which there is "overwhelming evidence," is tied to billions of dollars in untraceable small-donor donations – many tied to elderly Americans who had no knowledge their names were being used.
Those three numbers on the back
Chamberlain told show host Jody Hice that at some level, ActBlue failed to ensure proper security for credit cards by not requiring donors to provide the three-digit CVV code listed on the back.
"That code is an anti-fraud measure, and it costs more money to essentially provide charges without acquiring that code," the attorney relayed, "and yet ActBlue chose to do that."
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, while serving Florida in the Senate, raised concerns about ActBlue's refusal to require CVV codes for credit card donors.
The absence of the code makes it easier to record fraudulent transactions.
"We saw cases where individuals living in modest housing were recorded as donating hundreds of thousands of dollars," Comer noted. "That's not normal. That's money laundering."
"We are going forward with our investigation," he asserted. "This will be the end of the Democratic Party."
For the House committees, access to data that was blocked by the Biden administration has been more available under the Trump administration.
"We've been requesting information from ActBlue for months now. If they were innocent, they’d be on TV defending themselves," Comer said. "Instead, their lawyers are quitting, their executives are leaving, and they're silent. That tells you everything you need to know."
According to Chamberlain, sitting members of Congress could also be implicated for campaign finance violations in this scandal.
"It's possible that donations reached candidates without the candidates' knowledge of their origins, in which case, everything would fall on ActBlue," he explained. "But there's some legal exposure for the actual sitting officeholders."
He said campaign finance laws severely limit the amount of "hard money" one donor can contribute to one candidate; contributions in the range of $3,000 and more are typically made to a PAC.
"But if you have a way to pretend that this half a million dollars was actually from 250 small donors on ActBlue, then all of a sudden you've magically created half a million in hard money," Chamberlain posed. "If ActBlue has been essentially creating a straw donor setup, fake small donors to allow big money to come in behind their candidates … that's a massive scandal."
One example involves an elderly lady living on a fixed income who "had no idea" she was donating $200,000 over a six-month period to Democratic political campaigns.
Worst-case scenario for Democrats
Legal implications could find ActBlue being shut down and criminal charges for the board and senior executives.
Candidates and campaigns, if they can show they were unaware of the origin of the donations, could probably avoid criminal liability, but Chamberlain said, "There's still probably some FEC (Federal Election Commission) … requirement that they return some of the money."
If the campaigns or candidates are found to have knowingly sought or received tainted contributions, the threat of criminal liability returns.
Comer said that would be a worst-case scenario for Democrats.
"If ActBlue goes down, if people go to prison, if there are frog marches for ActBlue executives – the Democratic Party is finished," he said.
