The leaders of three Republican-led House committees accused ActBlue, the main Democratic fund-raising platform, of complacency in fraud prevention and demanded more information about the recent resignations of a raft of top executives.
“ActBlue’s internal turmoil, lack of a functioning legal team, possible retaliatory actions and failure to take fraud seriously raise a host of new questions about the platform’s ability to deter fraud and comply with legal requirements,” the chairmen of the House Judiciary, Oversight and Administration committees wrote in a four-page letter on Wednesday.
The Republican chairmen specifically demanded documents related to the resignation of officials in the general counsel’s office of ActBlue, which were first reported last month by The New York Times. Republicans began investigating ActBlue last year, and the efforts are part of a broader bid to target key pieces of the Democratic political infrastructure.
The committee chairmen, Representatives Jim Jordan of Ohio, James Comer of Kentucky and Bryan Steil of Wisconsin, also demanded testimony from two ActBlue employees whose names were redacted from a copy of the letter posted online.
The letter accompanied an interim staff report that was released on Wednesday, along with nearly 500 pages of internal ActBlue documents, accusing the nonprofit of “a fundamentally unserious approach to fraud prevention.”
Megan Hughes, a spokeswoman for ActBlue, said in a statement: “As we have historically done, ActBlue will continue to respond to requests from the House committees.”
The interim report from Republicans on the Judiciary, Oversight and Administration committees accused ActBlue of having “lowered its fraud-prevention standards” in 2024, pointing to, among other examples, a fraud specialist citing an annual goal that included “D.E.I. work.” While the report accused the company of opening the door to fraud, it did not contain any notable new examples but rather said the documents that it had “paint a picture of complacency.”
The turmoil at ActBlue was set off in late February when two unions that represent its staff members wrote a letter to ActBlue’s board warning that the departures of the lawyers in the firm’s general counsel’s office had left the remaining employees facing legal risk for their actions.
It remains unclear what instigated so many sudden departures from ActBlue. None of the officials who left the company have agreed to be interviewed on the record.
But the tumult and the congressional investigation come at a perilous moment for ActBlue and the Democratic candidates and causes that rely on it to process their fund-raising. Republicans at the Capitol and in the Trump administration are vying to cripple mechanisms Democrats rely on for finances and communications.
When a phone-banking system Democrats use went down briefly last weekend during the final get-out-the-vote period before Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election, some Democrats fretted that it could have been sabotaged by the political right, and then worried anew about the potential of Elon Musk’s buying Democratic tech firms in order to shut them down.
