House committees probing ActBlue argue fundraising platform obstructed and misled Congress

Three House committees leading a probe into ActBlue argued in a letter Tuesday that the liberal online fund-raising firm obstructed their investigation, misled Congress, and failed to comply with lawfully issued subpoenas seeking to investigate lax security practices for donations. 

The letter comes after House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan, House Oversight Chair James Comer and House Administration Chair Bryan Steil, vowed last week to continue their probe into the company after new reports that indicated ActBlue may have misled Congress in its testimony. 

The lawmakers also raised concerns about the fundraising giant’s failure to turn over responsive documents to its subpoenas, especially those about the platform's vulnerability to be used for illicit foreign donations to U.S. election campaigns, according to the letter obtained by Just the News.  

“Recent reporting by the New York Times confirms our initial findings and strongly suggests that ActBlue deliberately obstructed the Committees’ investigation, including through misleading statements and noncompliance with our subpoenas,” the chairmen wrote to ActBlue’s CEO Regina Wallace-Jones. 

“This has impeded the Committees’ ability to develop legislation protecting our elections against fraudulent political contributions and foreign interference.” 

You can read the letter below: 

The New York Times reported earlier this month that ActBlue’s lawyers warned the company last year that it may have misled Congress in a 2023 letter that claimed it used "multilayered” screenings of contributions to help “root out” donations from overseas, but the law firm found that some steps were not always followed. 

“This presents a substantial risk for ActBlue,” the law firm, Covington & Burling, wrote in one memo to ActBlue’s leadership in the wake of Wallace-Jones’ letter, the newspape reported. 

In one of the memos, the lawyers also warned that the misrepresentations may open the company to “potential criminal investigation.” 

“It can be alleged that ActBlue accepted and/or facilitated the acceptance of foreign-national contributions into American elections,” one memo states, according to The New York Times. “In addition, because ActBlue’s staff was aware that its system was not as robust as necessary, it could be alleged that these violations were ‘knowing and willful,’ a standard that both increases the penalties the F.E.C. might seek and gives the Justice Department jurisdiction for a potential criminal investigation.”

The New York Times’ reporting also included new details about the resignation of ActBlue’s former Interim General Counsel Aaron Ting that indicate the fundraising giant withheld documents previously subpoenaed by the committees, the chairmen wrote. 

The article references Ting’s resignation letter, which stated that the former general counsel stepped down from his role because of his concerns about “ActBlue’s past practices for screening political donations from abroad and its past representations to Congress regarding foreign donations and related matters.” 

However, the chairmen said that ActBlue never turned this letter over to Congress despite the subpoena for “[a]ll documents and communications referring or relating to the resignations of staff in ActBlue’s Office of the General Counsel[.]”

Steil vowed Monday that he would seek to hold ActBlue and its leadership accountable for failing to respond to the subpoenas and potentially misleading the committees. 

“[W]e're going to be holding entities like ActBlue accountable for their lack of transparency to Congress, potentially false and misleading statements that they made in regards to my 2023 investigation, and in further investigations going forward,” Steil told Just the News on Monday. 

“[W]e're going to bird dog this all the way to the end, because the standard here should be that the American people should have confidence that foreign money is not coming into US elections.”