An ActBlue supervisor watched a fraud analyst flag a donation from a foreign IP address.
The supervisor's response, documented in Slack messages now before Congress: "Great accept."
That two-word reply is what three House committees — Judiciary, Administration, and Oversight — laid out in their latest report: "Fraud on ActBlue, Part III: ActBlue's Failure to Prevent Illegal Foreign Political Contributions." This isn't about compliance blind spots or overworked fraud teams missing signals. The supervisors weren't absent when the foreign money came in. They were there, in writing, coaching analysts to wave it through.
ActBlue processes donations for virtually every Democratic candidate and left-wing cause in the country. When its supervisors are personally coaching fraud analysts to accept flagged foreign donations, the problem isn't a rogue employee.
The Slack messages show a pattern. Supervisors instructed analysts to "give the benefit of the doubt to the donor" on flagged contributions — including donations tied to foreign IP addresses and foreign credit cards. "Give the benefit of the doubt" sounds like customer service language until you remember that the donations in question were illegal under federal law.
Behind the supervisors was a verification system that didn't verify anything. ActBlue's passport check confirmed only the number of characters entered — not whether the passport was real, not whether it matched a government database. Any digit string worked. And when that workaround wasn't enough, a placeholder code — "ACTBLUEXX" — let future donations from a flagged account bypass passport prompts entirely.
The platform auto-accepted 99.8% of all donations. Of the small fraction that went to manual review, analysts rejected 5%. Total rejection rate for suspected fraud across the entire platform: less than 0.1%.
ActBlue's own systems detected at least 22 significant fraud campaigns with foreign connections. Then — and this is where the internal documentation becomes damning — the platform took "a more lenient approach" to fraud prevention and weakened its safeguards at least twice in 2024 anyway. Internal assessments predicted those changes would produce a "measurable increase in fraudulent contributions."
They weakened them anyway.
The Fifth Amendment count is no longer a footnote. Five ActBlue employees invoked it a combined 146 times during depositions. CEO Regina Wallace-Jones took the Fifth 22 times in June alone. You don't deploy that legal strategy because you're confident everything was lawful.
ActBlue's public response to Part III is identical to its response to Parts I and II: a third-party forensic analysis, commissioned by ActBlue, says there's nothing to see. Republicans need to move on.
The supervisors in those Slack messages gave the benefit of the doubt to the donors. ActBlue's PR operation is now asking for the benefit of the doubt from the public. Part III of an ongoing congressional investigation, a CEO who pleaded the Fifth 22 times, and a verification system that accepted "ACTBLUEXX" as valid passport documentation — that's what "move on" is asking you to forget.
The answer to "nothing to see here" is 146.
