Commentary: The Democrats’ ActBlue Ghost Donor Scandal Gets Bigger Every Day

by George Rasley

 

About 18 months ago Senator Marco Rubio sent a letter to the Federal Election Commission’s Chairwoman and Vice Chairman, Dara Lindenbaum and Sean J. Cooksey demanding answers on claims ActBlue, the billion-dollar Democrat fundraising platform, engaged in schemes to garner illegal campaign donations via “ghost donors.”

According to information received by Sen. Rubio, ActBlue has purportedly engaged in laundering millions of dollars in campaign donations through small donors, including senior citizens, via illegal contributions, without those donors’ consent or awareness.

Further, unlike nearly every other individual political campaign and political action committee, ActBlue does not require a card verification value (CVV) number as a requirement for donating. Requiring a CVV number as a condition of making an online transaction is standard practice across the e-commerce industry to reduce fraud and prevent unlawful foreign transactions. ActBlue must be held accountable for its apparent lack of security protocols.

These reports indicate that numerous individuals, including senior citizens, have purportedly donated to ActBlue thousands of times a year. However, according to recent investigative reports, many of these individuals had no idea that their names and addresses were being used to give thousands of dollars in political donations, with most of these “donations” going to ActBlue. It should come as no surprise that ActBlue serves as vessel for fraud, considering the intentional lack of security engrained within their donation processes and systems.

Senator Rubio’s letter went on to point out that recognizing foreign actors use fake accounts to exploit donation systems that do not have robust verification processes and systems in place, most individual campaigns and political action committees (PACs) require CVV numbers as part of making an online donation. However, in breaking with most organizations, ActBlue does not require CVV numbers as a requirement for donating, and thus lending itself as a facilitator of fraud.

It will surprise no one familiar with ActBlue and the individuals associated with it that the FEC did nothing with Sen. Rubio’s letter.

And this was nothing new in 2023.

A preliminary computer analysis by the Take Back Action Fund, obtained exclusively by Fox News, found that nearly half of all 2019 donations to ActBlue were made by people claiming to be unemployed.

“After downloading hundreds of millions of [dollars in] donations to the Take Back Action Fund servers, we were shocked to see that almost half of the donations to ActBlue in 2019 claimed to be unemployed individuals,” Action Fund President John Pudner said. “The name of employers must be disclosed when making political donations, but more than 4.7 million donations came from people who claimed they did not have an employer. Those 4.7 million donations totaled $346 million ActBlue raised and sent to liberal causes.”

The trend continued into 2020: An Action Fund examination of 2020 data from January through August showed an uptick in “unemployed” donations through ActBlue, to 50.1 percent this year.

Pudner said the large number is a red flag that some donations may be illicit contributions from foreign interests attempting to impact U.S. elections.

“It is hard to believe that at a time when the U.S. unemployment rate was less than 4 percent, that unemployed people had $346 million dollars to send to ActBlue for liberal causes,” Pudner said, adding that “4.7 million donations from people without a job … raised serious concerns.”

Fast forward to today and James O’Keefe of O’Keefe Media Group has been following up where the FEC refused to tread.

And O’Keefe (pictured above, left) found many more, such as this Wisconsin donor who was recorded as having made over 10,000 individual donations.

James O’Keefe, Matt Braynard, John Pudner and a United States Senator reported on irregularities in FEC donations starting in 2019 or before. They discovered that many people unknowingly donated larger sums of money to ActBlue than their actual donation.

This begs the question: Why haven’t the authorities investigated their findings and allegations? One reason that suggests itself is that the Democrats in charge of the Department of Justice and who hold a majority on the Federal Election Commission know exactly what’s going on and don’t want to cutoff the supply of illegal funds to their party.

That’s why we think it is incumbent upon the Republican House of Representatives to hold oversight hearings and Republican state Attorneys General to begin their own investigations using state laws on fraud and identity theft – and maybe RICO – to pry open ActBlue and put an end to their ghost donor money laundering scam.

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George Rasley is the Editor at ConservativeHQ.com
Photo “ActBlue Ghost Donor” by O’Keefe Media Group
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