Is ActBlue a Criminal Enterprise?

March 13, 2025 by Steve McCann

ActBlue was founded in 2004 as a Democrat Party political action committee (PAC) ostensibly to organize and raise campaign funds from “small donors.” On its website, ActBlue describes itself as “the home for small dollar donors” that “operates as a conduit, which means donations made through ActBlue to a campaign or organization are considered individual donations.” As such they are subject to considerably less legal scrutiny than large dollar donations.

In 2008, essentially the first presidential election in which ActBlue participated, they raised and spent $54.6 million on behalf of Democrat candidates. In 2012, they increased the amount raised and spent to $151.1 million. In 2016, as the political era of Donald Trump commenced, ActBlue’s fundraising dramatically increased to $653.6 Million. While a massive increase in fundraising, this was somewhat plausible considering the onset of Trump Derangement Syndrome among the Democrats and so-called progressives.

In the 2016 election cycle, the Democrat Party and its affiliates spent $4.6 Billionon the presidential and congressional races. Four years later in the 2020 cycle, they more than doubled the 2016 expenditures by spending $10.8 Billion. In 2016 ActBlue fundraising accounted for 14% of all Democrat spending whereas in 2020, it accounted for 40%, or nearly all the increase in spending between the two election cycles.

In 2020 the fundraising by ActBlue took a leap from $653.6 Million in 2016 to a staggering $4.32 Billion, a nearly sevenfold increase. That was followed by an equally staggering $2.4 Billion raised in the 2022 mid-term elections. In 2024, ActBlue continued this streak as their fundraising topped $3.8 Billion.

Is it remotely possible that these dramatic increases are solely due to an implausible tsunami of small-dollar donors flooding the ActBlue website, or are there other, potentially criminal explanations?

Recent congressional and private investigations have revealed that this phenomenal rise in fundraising and influence appears to be the result of an organized effort to flout and circumvent fundraising laws in order to launder money for the Democrat Party cabal in their continuing efforts to win elections by criminality, fraud, and manipulation.

In a September 2024 letter from the House Oversight Committee to then-Treasury secretary Janet Yellen requesting documents relating to ActBlue’s activities, Representative James Comer wrote: “ActBlue had not implemented standard procedures to guard against identity theft and fraud such as requiring Credit Verification Value (CVV) to process online transactions… ActBlue is also being investigated by several states’ officials in relation to contributions allegedly made via the platform fraudulently without the reported contributors' awareness.”

As David Catron points out at the American Spectator, this practice is known as “smurfing.” It is a direct form of identity theft whereby the names of the donors are repeatedly used without their knowledge to obfuscate and hide large-dollar political donations.

An examination of FEC data by David Catron revealed a single Colorado resident allegedly made 57,138 contributions -- one transaction every 1.3 days -- totaling $234,441 (or less than $5.00 per individual contribution). A Florida resident purportedly made 52,591 individual contributions totaling $387,720.00. And one California resident supposedly made 52,501 separate contributions -- an average of one transaction every 2.5 days -- totaling $884,152 (or less than $17.00 per individual contribution). There are thousands of examples with similarly implausible contribution patterns.

Independent journalist James O’Keefe looked into these activities and interviewed a number of people who ActBlue reported as having made high-volume, low-dollar individual contributions. Those he interviewed emphatically denied donating the money in the amounts or frequency as reported by ActBlue.

What, therefore, were the potential sources of the massive inflow of funds into ActBlue that cannot be accounted for by any reasonable measure of small donations and that apparently require an active money-laundering scheme involving identity theft and credit card fraud?

First, there are the potential contributions from prominent domestic left-wing billionaires such as George Soros, Reid Hoffman, Herbert Sandler, Laurene Powell Jobs, et al that could require the laundering of their contributions. But this is the least likely source of ActBlue funding as many of these domestic billionaires have their own PACS to support Democrat candidates and progressive causes.

A second, and far more plausible source of contributions, are foreign governments and billionaires who cannot legally contribute to political campaigns in the United States. The machinations that have thus far been exposed concerning the inner workings of ActBlue make it the perfect conduit for foreign interference via near-unlimited political contributions. It is supremely naïve to believe that numerous national governments through designated groups or individuals have not taken advantage of ActBlue’s deliberately compromised online verification process and de facto money laundering.

The third source of potential contributions is the American taxpayer. During the five-year period beginning in January of 2020 through the end of December 2024, ActBlue raised an astonishing $10.4 Billion whereas in the previous five years it raised $2.16 Billion. It is not a coincidence that during this same five-year timeframe the federal government spent, using the faux pandemic of COVID-19 as the justification, an equally stunning yearly average increase of 45% or $2.05 Trillion per year more than the 2019 expenditure level.

The budgets of numerous agencies, such as USAID and the EPA as well as departments such as Education and Commerce, which dole out vast numbers of grants and contracts to NGOs, experienced massive increases. For example, the EPA’s budget increased sixfold between 2019 and 2024.

Thanks to the work of Elon Musk and DOGE, the American people now know innumerable grants from virtually all agencies and departments, totaling into the hundreds of billions, were issued without any oversight to thousands of Democrat-affiliated NGOs. The inescapable assumption is that a sizable portion of those funds made their way into the laundromat at ActBlue and eventually into the coffers of the Democrat Party and its candidates.

The exposure of the potential corruption and the inner workings of ActBlue may well be what precipitated the abrupt February departure of seven senior officials, including the associate general counsel -- the highest-ranking legal officer at ActBlue -- as well as the chief revenue officer. The future of ActBlue is in legal limbo as Republicans in Congress aggressively expand their investigations. The forwarding of criminal referrals to the Justice Department appears to be inevitable.

Never in the 236-year political history of the United States has there been a more expansive, criminal, and blatant scheme to manipulate the electoral process than the actions of ActBlue in league with the Democrat Party. This lawless and corrupt alliance underscores the depravity and anti-Americanism that has become the foundational bedrock of the American Left and much of the current ruling class.