April 24 (UPI) — President Donald Trump on Thursday signed a memorandum directing the Justice Department to investigate ActBlue, an important political action committee and fundraising platform for Democratic Party candidates.
The memorandum is the latest attack by Trump targeting political opponents, critics and organizations that stand against his policies. Targets have ranged from law firms with ties to Democrats and attorneys who prosecuted him to former Trump administration officials who contradicted his narrative election fraud in the 2020 contest and even universities that pushed back against his administration trying to direct hiring practices and curricula.
A factsheet from the White House states that the memorandum directs Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate online fundraising platforms for illegal “straw” donations, “dummy” accounts and contributions from foreigners.
Straw donations are those made under the name of one person to conceal the funds’ actual owner and dummy accounts use gift cards or prepaid credit cards to conceal the origin of the money.
The memorandum specifically calls out ActBlue, highlighting a House Republican report published earlier this month, stating that its internal documents show at least 22 “significant fraud campaigns” over the last few years that include fraudulent donations to a handful of Democratic politicians.
The memorandum also states that during a 30-day period of the 2024 election campaign, ActBlue detected 237 donations from foreign IP addresses using prepaid cards.
“We’re going to fix our elections so that our elections are going to be honorable and honest,” Trump said in a statement.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Ky., applauded the memorandum as building on Republican efforts to “hold ActBlue accountable.
“Thank you @POTUS for standing up for election integrity, putting America FIRST and fighting back against fraudulent schemes from groups like ActBlue,” he said on X.
UPI has asked ActBlue for comment.
On its social media accounts, the nonprofit said Trump’s attack is “an attempt to tear down all we have built, but we are united and undeterred.”
The memorandum was met with swift condemnation and accusations of being designed to undermine the United States’ democracy and an act of hypocrisy by Trump, who has been accused of receiving millions from more than a dozen governments during his first term in power.
“Today’s presidential decree targeting the campaign infrastructure of the Democratic Party with precisely zero evidence of wrongdoing is the kind of edict you’d expect from a power-mad dictator in a banana republic,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, said in a statement.
“It’s not too late for my Republican colleagues — who once pretended to care about the political weaponization of government and even stood up an entire committee purporting to investigate it — to call out this blatantly partisan assault on American political freedom.”
A joint statement from the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Democratic Governors Association rebuked Trump’s attack on ActBlue as retaliation.
“He knows Americans are already fed up with his chaotic agenda that is driving the economy off a cliff, so he’s trying to block lawful grassroots donations from supporters giving must $5 or $10 to candidates who oppose him while further empowering the corrupt billionaires who already control his administration,” the organizations heads said.
“As Democrats, we’re unified in standing with the millions of Americans who are fighting back against Trump’s dangerous abuses of power.”
Since returning to the White House on Jan. 20, Trump has used his executive powers to conduct a campaign of retaliation against his opponents.
Through memorandums and executive orders, Trump has sanctioned at least five major law firms over their connections to Democrats, such as his former presidential opponent Hillary Clinton, and Robert Mueller, the former special counsel tasked with investigating allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and potential links between the Kremlin and the New York real estate mogul’s election campaign.
He has also stripped security clearances from dozens of officials from the former Biden administration.
The president also opened Justice Department investigations into Chris Krebs, the former Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency head, who disagreed with Trump’s allegations of widespread election fraud in 2020 — when he said it was “the most secure” election in U.S. history — as well as former Department of Homeland Security Chief of Staff Miles Taylor, who was a critic of Trump’s first term in office.
