In 2004, a group of Democratic activists built a central online hub to make campaign donations easier. ActBlue’s founders said they were using the internet to “democratize the least democratic part of the political process,” and by the 2023–24 election cycle, ActBlue was processing $3.8 billion in contributions.
In the third quarter of 2024 alone, nearly 7 million donors made 31.7 million contributions through ActBlue. Those donations totaled $1.55 billion and went to more than 18,000 Democratic and progressive campaigns and groups. That was in just one quarter.
ActBlue is now the dominant online fundraising platform for Democratic politicians, and for thousands of Democratic campaigns, clicking “Donate” sends the supporter straight into ActBlue.
An April 2025 joint House staff report, based on documents from ActBlue and its fraud contractor Sift, showed that in 2023 ActBlue knew it had a fraud problem. Its own employees detected at least 22 major fraud campaigns, some from overseas. In spite of this ActBlue raised its fraud-review thresholds “across the board” in April 2024, calling the changes a “more lenient approach,” leading to even more fraud.
By July, internal notes admitted that ActBlue was “accepting” more fraud.
Employees reviewing suspicious transactions were trained to “look for reasons to accept contributions.” They were told not to reject a donation because of one suspicious detail. Instead they should “look for the forest and not the trees.” ActBlue’s own notes called this approach “a bit antithetical” to stopping fraud.
American campaign-finance law bans foreign nationals from giving to federal elections. It also bans contributions made in someone else’s name. ActBlue makes both kinds of fraud easy. There are clear cases where someone’s identity was used to donate money through people who never knew about their contributions.
Elizabeth Waffle, an 88-year-old woman in Michigan, was listed as making nearly 15,000 contributions totaling about $150,000 over five years. She lives on a modest pension and told reporters she had made only a few dozen small donations. Clifford Slayman was listed for 7,539 contributions totaling $213,163. He signed an affidavit calling it fraud. Barbara Schmerzler signed an affidavit after 2,549 contributions totaling about $41,000 were listed under her name.
Investigators later found 18 Democrats in Connecticut over the age of 70 whose names were tied to roughly $1.9 million in political contributions. Some said they had made small donations, but their information was then used for many more donations they never knew about.
Someone donated that money in a kind of reverse identity theft. The stolen identity was not used to take money, as in normal identity theft. It was used to give money illegally, and since the name on the donation belongs to a real person, the contribution looks legal. No bill ever goes to the person whose name was used to give the donation, so the person whose identity is stolen is completely unaware.
Moving this kind of money into campaigns by hand would be a logistical nightmare. Someone would have to give cash to large numbers of people and then coordinate their donations to avoid red flags. Small-dollar digital fundraising automates the whole process. Five million dollars can be split into 250,000 contributions of about $20 each in just a few seconds.
Donor-identity theft also helps with marketing. Journalists treat small-dollar fundraising as proof of grassroots support, and parties use fundraising numbers to judge a candidate’s viability. Real donors are drawn to candidates who look like they are gaining momentum, so a sophisticated donor-identity operation could deliver both campaign cash and the appearance of a real political movement.
American campaign-finance law bans foreign nationals from giving to federal elections.
And in the 2023–2024 election cycle, hostile foreign powers were circling ActBlue like vultures.
During one 30-day stretch in September and October of 2024, ActBlue detected 237 contributions made with prepaid credit cards from foreign IP addresses. Internal documents show that as this kind of fraud grew, the company became more open to it. It continued to raise the thresholds that triggered fraud review and adopted what its own papers called a “more lenient approach.” Its analysis estimated that the change allowed more fraudulent transactions to go through. A few months later, internal notes acknowledged that ActBlue knew it was accepting more fraud.
ActBlue is a partisan group, so it has every incentive to help its side. Accepting fraud helps the campaigns receiving donations whereas rejecting fraud denies those campaigns cash.
By March 2025, according to a second joint staff report, every member of ActBlue’s legal and compliance team had either resigned, been fired, or gone on extended leave. Five current or former employees invoked the Fifth Amendment a combined 146 times in depositions. Congressional investigators also cited an internal legal analysis from outside counsel warning that ActBlue could be accused of accepting or facilitating foreign-national contributions.
After Congress investigated, ActBlue made some changes. It now requires CVV codes for credit-card donations and blocks foreign IP addresses. Those steps will not stop foreign donors who have valid credit cards with CVV codes (including the prepaid ones), and who use an American IP address through a VPN, but the changes do raise an obvious question: these are common fraud-prevention tools, so why were these basic protections not in place before?
A July 2026 White House report of declassified intelligence says China bought, stole, or hacked the voter-registration data of 220 million Americans. That data, combined with domestic-looking payment methods and a VPN, would give China what it needs to commit donor-identity theft at scale, and in a close election moving just a few percentage points determines who wins.
Beijing has clear interests in who Americans elect. If China can help elect people who favor things that benefit China, it could gain influence over U.S. policy toward Taiwan, Pacific military commitments, tariffs, technology controls, energy, Chinese access to American capital, and scrutiny of Chinese influence operations.
A sophisticated foreign influence operation does not need to bribe an American politician. It only needs to find American politicians who hold views helpful to the foreign government, and then to help those people get elected. Breaking large sums into hundreds or thousands of small donations through ActBlue would accomplish that, and ActBlue was demonstrably vulnerable to exactly this kind of fraud.
The politician, the campaign, and legitimate donors need never even know the fraud occurred.
Qatar too has interests in American elections too, as does Iran, Russia, and a number of other hostile foreign powers.
A July 2026 White House report of declassified intelligence says China bought, stole, or hacked the voter-registration data of 220 million Americans.
I have written at length about Qatar’s information jihad operation. A peer-reviewed 2024 study of foreign funding in American universities found nearly $2.8 billion from Qatar, making Qatar the largest foreign source of money for U.S. colleges and universities. The study also found that funding from the Organization of Islamic Cooperation preceded censorship of views critical of Islam, and led directly to higher levels of anti-Semitism on American campuses. Those changes can be traced school by school.
Correlation is not causation, but it is hard to believe Qatar is giving universities that much money with no strings attached. Our universities increasingly teach Qatari talking points. Those talking points are anti-American, anti-Western, anti-Israel, and anti-Semitic.
The Congressional Research Service (CRS) describes Hamas as an outgrowth of the Muslim Brotherhood and notes that Qatar hosted Hamas’s political office, along with many of Hamas’ leaders, in Doha. CRS also notes that Qatar hosts the International Union of Islamic Scholars, which it calls a Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated tool.
The Qatari regime is fiercely anti-Semitic, and the International Union of Islamic Scholars, in Doha, called for the extermination of the world’s Jewish population by 2033. Following is a direct quote:
Today humanity has realized that you are a threat to the world’s peace and security, and the countdown to your end—which will be imminent, Allah willing—has already begun. Note in your diaries today, not tomorrow, that by the end of the first third of this century, between 2025 and 2033, you will be nothing but history future generations will talk about. Take into consideration that this time the world will not take pity upon you, and that, when its anger boils over, not one of you will be left upon the Earth. Trump’s veto power, or that of whoever succeeds him, will not avail you.
Muslim Brotherhood-linked networks operate in the United States. In the Holy Land Foundation prosecution, the Justice Department presented evidence that the Muslim Brotherhood created a Palestine Committee in the United States specifically to support Hamas.
Qatar has worked hard to change American political views on Israel, Zionism, Hamas, and political Islam, and though I cannot prove that Qatar used ActBlue to fund the campaigns of Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Abdul El-Sayed, Zoran Mamdani, or anyone else, Qatar has every reason to help such candidates win, and ActBlue is an open door it could easily use if it has not done so already.
It is no surprise that as Qatari support of American institutions has increased, so too has the anti-Semitism of the public, and with more and more Islamic candidates winning primaries, we need to do a thorough investigation to ensure that Qatari money is not going into our political campaigns.
Our universities increasingly teach Qatari talking points. Those talking points are anti-American, anti-Western, anti-Israel, and anti-Semitic.
We usually picture this kind of corruption as foreign agents offering politicians money in exchange for a vote, but it makes far more sense for foreign agents to find sympathetic candidates and support them without the candidates ever knowing. That way, if the funding later comes to light, the candidate is protected from blame and can stay in office.
Suppose an American politician sincerely believes the United States should change its relationship with Israel. Suppose another sincerely believes America should reduce its commitment to defending Taiwan. If they can successfully disguise the source of the money, Qatar and China can put as much money as they want into those campaigns without ever telling the candidates.
I don’t know that hostile foreign powers did donate to American political campaigns, but we do know ActBlue detected donations from foreign IP addresses that used domestic prepaid cards. We know ActBlue loosened its fraud standards even though internal evidence showed the change would let more fraud through. We know employees were trained to “look for reasons to accept contributions.”
We know real Americans have disputed thousands of contributions made in their names.
We know China and other foreign adversaries have collected information about Americans, including hacking the voter data of over 220 million voters. We know China, Qatar, Iran, Russia, and other foreign powers have every strategic reason to influence American elections.
What we do not know is whether any of those governments have already combined these vulnerabilities to pour foreign money into American campaigns at scale. My guess is that they have, and this is a testable hypothesis that starts with Elizabeth Waffle.
Identify every ActBlue transaction she says she did not make. Examine the IP address, device information, transaction history, fraud flags, and other data in ActBlue’s systems. Check whether supposedly unrelated donors used the same payment methods or devices.
Do the same with every other donor who disputes transactions attributed to them. Then follow the money backward.
If the money came from Waffle’s own accounts, the transaction is probably legal. If hundreds or thousands of unrelated contributions all used the same financial sources, that would point to fraud at scale. If the money trail leads overseas, we can follow it.
Congress also needs to subpoena ActBlue’s full databases rather than relying on selected emails and testimony. Payment methods, IP addresses, device information, fraud scores, rejected transactions, accepted suspicious transactions, refunds, and chargebacks can all be analyzed for patterns.
This cannot be a partisan investigation. WinRed and every other major political payment processor should face the same scrutiny. I am starting with ActBlue as we already know it processed fraudulent transactions, but that does not mean ActBlue is alone. We need to investigate all of them. We should also ask whether it makes sense for partisan actors to run such financing operations when they have every incentive to accept fraud.
If we are not willing to take election integrity seriously, we should expect hostile foreign powers to take our lack of election integrity very seriously.
Is it possible that every sophisticated foreign intelligence and influence operation on Earth looked at a system moving billions of dollars, saw that donations could be funneled through real American identities, and then politely decided to leave our elections alone? It is possible, but unlikely. If I can see how easy this is, we have to assume they can see it too.
I, for one, would like to find out.
We also need practical safeguards to protect future elections. Every online political contribution, no matter how small, should include verified identity information that is cross-checked against government databases in real time. An email should be sent to the person making the donation giving them the option to question it, and to opt-out of future donations.
Prepaid cards, virtual cards, and other anonymous payment methods should be banned for political contributions. Payment processors should be required to automatically flag and reject any donation originating from a foreign IP address or a VPN, with no exceptions.
Platforms like ActBlue and WinRed should be forced to retain device fingerprints, IP logs, and payment-source data for every transaction for at least ten years. Executives should face criminal liability if they knowingly raise fraud thresholds or instruct staff to look for reasons to accept suspicious contributions.
Limits should also be placed on the total number of donations that can come from the same IP address, device, or payment instrument. Finally, a public, searchable database of all contributions under $200 would let journalists and investigators spot patterns of donor-identity theft.
I don’t know that China, Qatar, Iran, Russia, or any other foreign power has already flooded American campaigns with illegal money through ActBlue. What I do know is that the system is wide open for them to do so. ActBlue knew it had a serious fraud problem and lowered its defenses, training staff to look for reasons to accept questionable contributions.
We do not need to wait for proof to launch a full investigation. Congress should subpoena the full transaction databases of ActBlue, WinRed, and every other major political payment processor, and investigators should start with the disputed donors, following the money backwards.
If we are not willing to take election integrity seriously, we should expect hostile foreign powers to take our lack of election integrity very seriously. We have a right to safe and secure elections, and election security does not begin and end at the ballot box. We also have a right to know that every dollar used to elect an American leader came from someone legally entitled to give it.
