In early 2025, the law firm, Covington & Burling out of Washington DC, raised legal concerns that ActBlue’s CEO lied to GOP investigators in a 2023 letter explaining how the organization vetted donations to ensure that they were not illegally coming from foreign citizens.
This shocking development was published in The New York Times this week.
Laura Ingraham and Chip Roy discussed this latest ActBlue scandal on Thursday night.
Heads should roll! pic.twitter.com/zSNUz7rHdy
— Karli Bonne’ 🇺🇸 (@KarluskaP) April 2, 2026
(…) The colloquial term used to describe this alleged operation is “smurfing.” Peter Bernegger, Chris Gleason, Phil Allison, and their team discovered this suspected campaign money laundering operation and went public with it in 2023 when James O’Keefe’s OMG published videos interviewing suspected victims of this scheme.
(…) On Friday, Bernegger joined the Why We Vote podcast to discuss the recent reports that have come out of Congress via Rep. Bryan Steil and Rep. Jim Jordan. According to subpoenaed records from ActBlue, Just The News reported that ActBlue updated its policy on Sept 9th to “automatically reject donations that use foreign prepaid/gift cards, domestic gift cards, are from high-risk/sanctioned countries, and have the highest level of risk as determined,” by its solution provider, Sift.
Bernegger had several crucial updates regarding their own investigation into this money-laundering scheme regarding an automated process to make the donations, why ActBlue’s policy update likely won’t have any impact on any accounts established before the change, and whether or not the incoming Trump administration will engage in this investigation.
New Smurf Evidence
Senator Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) has allegedly benefitted from ActBlue “Smurfing” operations, including 12 donors responsible for identical contributions totalling over $2.4 million
Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) raised approximately $30.9 million in her 2018 campaign. Her 2024 campaign, however, trounced that number, nearly doubling it to $59.6 million. From July 25, 2024 to September 30, 2024, she raised $11 million with $9.4 million coming from individual ‘donors,’ according to WPR.
By comparison, her opponent, Eric Hovde, raised just $29.3 million with $20 million of that being a personal loan he made to his campaign. In that same July to September timeframe, Hovde raised $2.8 million from individual donors.
Using state and federal government data, Bernegger has publicly accused Baldwin of benefiting from the illegal smurfing operation. According to his data and investigation, Baldwin has received $27,850,750 via the smurfing operation since 2017, including 69,433 donations since 2017 from a single donor, “Sonia.” “Sonia” lives in an assisted living facility, but that didn’t stop her from allegedly donating 7.5 times per day, every single day, for 7.5 years.
For years Democrats were suspected of using foreign donations to finance their campaigns. According to the FEC.gov website, there are potentially thousands upon thousands of individuals whose identities are being stolen to launder millions of dollars to political campaigns and PACs across the country.
It now looks like ActBlue may be in some serious trouble. It’s about time.
Maybe the new Attorney General will take this on?
(Read more: The Gateway Pundit, 4/3/2026) (Archive)
UPDATE: 4/4/2026
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.
So, ActBlue lied to Congress. That’s a federal crime.
But then the piece gets even more gloomy for ActBlue. Apparently, the lawyers reportedly warned ActBlue that the situation carried real legal risk, including the possibility that prosecutors could see this as something knowing and willful, hence the “federal crime” stuff.
NYT:
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.
This is where the NYT softball stuff starts to crumble. ActBlue knew this was a powder keg. They were warned.
The memos raised the possibility that foreign money may have gotten through and that staff knew the safeguards were not as strong as they needed to be.
NYT:
It can be alleged that ActBlue accepted and/or facilitated the acceptance of foreign-national contributions into American elections,” one memo states. “In addition, because ActBlue’s staff was aware that its system was not as robust as necessary, it could be alleged that these violations were ‘knowing and willful,’ a standard that both increases the penalties the F.E.C. might seek and gives the Justice Department jurisdiction for a potential criminal investigation.
That right there is devastating. We’re now looking at some very real fraud.