“Benefit of the Doubt”: House Report Says ActBlue Approved Flagged Foreign Donations After a Fake Passport Gate

Three House Republican committees released a third interim staff report Wednesday accusing ActBlue, the principal online fundraising pipeline for Democratic campaigns, of failing to block illegal foreign political contributions and of describing a passport check that did not verify passports.

The report, titled “Fraud on ActBlue, Part III: ActBlue’s Failure to Prevent Illegal Foreign Political Contributions,” was issued jointly by the Committee on House Administration, the House Judiciary Committee, and the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The chairs are Rep. Bryan Steil, R-Wis., Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and Rep. James Comer, R-Ky.

“Our investigation found that ActBlue weakened fraud safeguards despite detecting significant fraud campaigns, including several from foreign sources,” the committees said.

The staff account says ActBlue, “in its own words, decided to take ‘a more lenient approach’ to fraud prevention in 2024, weakening its fraud-prevention policies at least twice even though internal assessments showed that these changes would result in a measurable increase in fraudulent contributions.”

The most specific finding concerns the platform’s foreign-address prompt. ActBlue told the committees that a donor who enters a non-U.S. address sees a popup requesting a passport number. The report says the company’s own policy required only that the donor type the correct number of characters. The feature “uses very basic validation—number of characters—to ensure that the number entered is a valid passport number, but [it does] not verify the information in any other way.” It did not check the number against a government database. It stored the string and let the contribution proceed.

Review logs produced June 25, covering flagged donations from Oct. 9, 2022, through Oct. 31, 2024, show supervisors telling fraud analysts to “give the benefit of the doubt to the donor.” The report cites cases in which staff were told to ignore foreign indicators and, in at least one instance, to treat a social-media account as citizenship evidence. One contribution was approved because the donor had a Twitter account “despite ‘all signs’ pointing to Canada.” Another analyst flagged “an odd pattern of small donations to the [Kamala] Harris campaign using prepaid cards.” A colleague marked it “good to accept.”

The committees also describe internal legal alarm. After an employee identified as Ting resigned, lawyer Zain Ahmad, described as the last remaining attorney on ActBlue’s legal team, went on leave and had his system access revoked in late February 2025, against company policy. Before he left, the report says, Ahmad notified leadership and the board of “credible allegations of misconduct,” including alleged federal campaign-finance violations and false statements to Congress.

The New York Times previously reported that Dana Remus, ActBlue’s outside counsel and a former Biden White House counsel, drafted memoranda concluding that CEO Regina Wallace-Jones may have misled Congress about foreign-contribution review and that acceptance of illegal foreign contributions appeared “knowing and willful.” The committees say a Times story in April cited a resignation letter and internal messages that ActBlue had not produced to Congress, even after the platform said it had turned over everything relevant.

ActBlue denied wrongdoing. “There’s nothing to see here,” the organization said. It pointed to a third-party forensic analysis that it said “completely undermined a central claim” and called the report “another political stunt before rushing out of town weeks early to go campaign.”