President Trump is expected to sign a presidential memorandum on Thursday targeting major Democrat online donation platform, ActBlue - specifically cracking down on foreign contributions in American elections, Politico reports, citing a person Trump admin leaker familiar with the policy.
The crackdown is expected to involve Attorney General Pam Bondi's office.
Related:
According to Elon Musk, "ActBlue is currently under investigation for allowing foreign and illegal donations in criminal violation of campaign finance regulations. This week, 7 ActBlue senior officials resigned, including the associate general counsel."
An investigation has found 5 ActBlue-funded groups responsible for Tesla “protests”: Troublemakers, Disruption Project, Rise & Resist, Indivisible Project and Democratic Socialists of America.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 8, 2025
ActBlue funders include George Soros, Reid Hoffman, Herbert Sandler, Patricia Bauman,…
For starters, ActBlue did not require a card verification value (CVV) for donations, according to Rep. Bryan Steil (R-Wis.), chairman of the House Administration Committee, who sent letters and information collected over the past year to Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, Florida, and Missouri for further investigation into ActBlue.
“The final analysis produced a set of anomalous donor profiles, ranked by the severity of the inconsistencies. In reviewing this analysis, it became clear there is suspicious activity occurring that warrants further review,” the letter stated.
In December 2023, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton opened an investigation into ActBlue alleging the platform "may enable fraud," and that "straw donations" were systematically being made using false identities through untraceable payment methods.
Paxton said in an Aug. 8 statement ActBlue has cooperated with the Texas investigation and will now require CVV codes for credit card contributions.
ActBlue targets small-dollar donations, the Hill first reported, and has been an integral part of the Democratic fundraising structure, collecting an estimated $1.5 billion from about 7 million donors.
While that influx of cash was split among nearly 19,000 campaigns, an excessive amount has gone to the highest profile races. In just the first few days of the Harris campaign, for example, donors gave her $200 million through the platform, per ActBlue’s account on the social platform X, the Hill reported. -Fox News
In his letter to attorneys general, Steil said whistleblowers reported “anomalies” in Federal Election Commission donor records.
That prompted a data analysis of records spanning 14 years, which looked for suspicious trends by comparing donation patterns to open-source consumer data, voter rolls, and political profiling databases.
The ensuing investigation included consultations with the election commission, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, and the Office of Foreign Assets Control, according to Steil’s letter.
Findings included donations that were significantly disproportionate to a person’s net worth or previous giving history; uncharacteristic donations from party-affiliated registered voters that suddenly contributed to candidates of the opposing party; and unusually frequent donations from the elderly and first-time donors.
Maybe now someone can explain why donations were made, in my name, to Act Blue candidates in KANSAS...
— Matt Van Swol (@matt_vanswol) April 24, 2025
...when I've never been to Kansas. pic.twitter.com/YiwbU2DoiT
Similar concerns were raised in March 2023 by O'Keefe Media Group, which reported that some senior citizens in Maryland and elsewhere denied making the donations attributed to them in Federal Election Commission records.
Donors contacted by O'Keefe Media Group said they made political contributions to ActBlue but had no knowledge of making what amounted to thousands of donations—with some totaling more than $200,000—in a few years.
In December, Steil announced that documents turned over by ActBlue showed that the company had implemented new policies to "automatically reject donations that use foreign prepaid/gift cards, domestic gift cards, are from high-risk/sanctioned countries, and have the highest level of risk as determined," but said there "is still more work to be done."
