ActBlue May Have Misled Congress on Vetting Foreign Donations, Its Lawyers Warned [View all]

Source: New York Times

ActBlue May Have Misled Congress on Vetting Foreign Donations, Its Lawyers Warned

The Democratic fund-raising group is facing investigations from the Justice Department and congressional Republicans ahead of the midterm elections.

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Regina Wallace-Jones, the chief executive of the liberal fund-raising organization ActBlue, at the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. A 2023 letter from her to Congress later played a role in internal turmoil at ActBlue. Todd Heisler/The New York Times

By Reid J. Epstein and Shane Goldmacher
This article is based on internal legal memos, emails, resignation letters, Slack messages and interviews with current and former ActBlue employees.

April 2, 2026, 5:02 a.m. ET

In early 2025, a law firm working for ActBlue, the Democratic fund-raising behemoth, delivered the organization a startling warning. ... The firm concluded that ActBlue's chief executive had given a potentially misleading response to congressional Republican investigators in a 2023 letter explaining how the organization vetted donations to ensure that they were not illegally coming from foreign citizens.

The letter from the chief executive, Regina Wallace-Jones, said ActBlue carried out "multilayered" screenings of contributions that helped "root out" those from overseas. In fact, the law firm found, some of the steps she had described were not always followed.

"This presents a substantial risk for ActBlue," the law firm, Covington & Burling, wrote in one of two memos expressing legal concerns. One memo raised the specter of a criminal investigation if prosecutors believed that ActBlue had tried to conceal facts about its efforts to prevent foreign contributions.

Federal election law prohibits foreign citizens or people who are not permanent residents from donating directly to federal candidates or political action committees. Lying to or obstructing Congress is a crime. ... The memos instigated a meltdown at the highest levels of ActBlue, one of the Democratic Party's most vital financial organs. ... A series of top officials resigned in quick succession. The New York Times revealed those departures last year, but a key cause of the tumult at ActBlue -- the legal warnings about potentially misleading Congress over vetting foreign donations -- is being reported here for the first time.

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Reid J. Epstein is a Times reporter covering campaigns and elections from Washington.
https://www.nytimes.com/by/reid-j-epstein

Shane Goldmacher is a Times national political correspondent.
https://www.nytimes.com/by/shane-goldmacher

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/02/us/politics/actblue-democrat-fundraising-foreign-donations.html