ActBlue has been, for much better or for much worse, a change agent in the landscape of American politics. It turns out it may have accomplished that by allowing non-Americans to interfere with our elections via direct donations to Democratic candidates — something that is, in case you’re unfamiliar with federal law, very,veryillegal.

But now that legislators and law enforcement have turned their attention to whether or not ActBlue cared whether people were using its platform to break the law, employees for the donation platform are staying mum, invoking the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination no less than 146 times when testifying before the House Judiciary Committee.

In anews releaseMonday about their investigation into the fundraising platform, the Judiciary Committee described the “mass exodus of the Democrat fundraising platform’s legal and compliance teams in the months following the 2024 election” and how “ActBlue made its fraud-prevention rules ‘more lenient’ twice in 2024 — even though there is extensive fraud on the platform, including from foreign sources.”

The platform, which was founded in 2004, is nominally a political action committee. In reality, it’s basically likePayPalfor campaign donations — and it’s been wildly successful. According toCNN, in a little over 20 years, it had raised $16 billion for Democratic candidates. While Republicans have caught up in terms of online campaign infrastructure, ActBlue’s early success in the field of small online donations gave Democrats a big boost for a long while.

However, starting in the aftermath of the 2024 election, questions began to be raised about ActBlue’s compliance with basic campaign finance laws. Then, 142 individuals who were ex-employees, campaign staff, consultants, and others close to or who had studied the platform signed aletterin which they accused ActBlue of “tactics [that] are exploiting donors, harming the Democratic Party’s brand, and causing damage to the progressive fundraising ecosystem.”

That same day,Campaigns & Electionsreported, House Republicans looked into “foreign interference” in elections, including with ActBlue. GOP Rep. Bryan Steil of Wisconsin, who chairs the Committee on House Administration, had already sent a letter to ActBlue asking for info on their “donor verification policies and the potential for foreign actors, primarily from Iran, Russia, Venezuela, and China, to use ActBlue to launder illicit money into U.S. political campaigns.”

TL;DR, we’ve gotten to the point where ActBlue’s safeguards against this sort of thing, or absolute lack thereof, are or were nonexistent. Earlier this month,The New York Timesreported that in April of 2025, a law firm representing the platform “concluded that ActBlue’s chief executive had given a potentially misleading response to congressional Republican investigators in a 2023 letter explaining how the organization vetted donations to ensure that they were not illegally coming from foreign citizens” and that “some of the steps” an ActBlue executive said were in place to prevent this from happening “were not always followed.”

“The memos instigated a meltdown at the highest levels of ActBlue, one of the Democratic Party’s most vital financial organs,” the Times reported.

“A series of top officials resigned in quick succession. The New York Times revealed those departures last year, but a key cause of the tumult at ActBlue — the legal warnings about potentially misleading Congress over vetting foreign donations — is being reported here for the first time.”

And now we have the report fromHouse Judiciary, which notes that “five current or former employees at ActBlue who appeared for depositions all invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self incrimination during questioning — for a total of 146 times.”

Source: VidNews » Feed