Democrats built their campaign war chests on one giant online money machine.
House Republicans kept asking where all that cash really came from, and the answers kept changing.
And Jim Jordan boxed in one ActBlue lawyer with a passport secret Democrats hoped nobody would find.
The letter that landed on Ronald Machen’s desk
ActBlue is the fundraising platform the Democrat Party runs on. US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) uses it. Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed uses it. So do the Democrat leaders of the House and Senate.
House Republicans have accused the company for years of running loose checks on who is actually giving the money. Federal law bars foreign nationals from donating to American campaigns, and Republicans say ActBlue may have taken in potentially millions of dollars in foreign cash.
Now three committee chairmen want a word with ActBlue attorney Ronald Machen.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH), Committee on House Administration Chairman Bryan Steil (R-WI), and House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) sent Machen a letter on September 28, 2026, calling him in for a closed-door interview before October 9, according to Fox News Digital.
The reason is simple. Machen briefed all three committees on September 11, 2026, and the chairmen say his account doesn’t match the documents sitting in their files.
“Your review appears to be nothing more than an after-the-fact sugarcoating of ActBlue’s misconduct and Ms Wallace-Jones’s misrepresentations to the House Administration Committee,” the chairmen wrote.
That’s ActBlue CEO Regina Wallace-Jones. She invoked the Fifth Amendment when the House Administration Committee questioned her at a June 10, 2026 hearing.
A passport field that takes “ACTBLUEXX” for an answer
Here is where it gets ugly for ActBlue.
The company has long pointed to its passport number requirement as the safeguard against foreign money. But a House report released in September 2026 says the passport field only checks whether a donor typed the right number of characters. It doesn’t confirm the number belongs to a real US passport.
And the letter to Machen goes further than that.
“These documents demonstrate that if a donor did not have a U.S. passport or a U.S. address, an ActBlue employee retained the ability to determine an ‘alternative method of verifying the [donor’s] citizenship,'” the chairmen wrote.
According to the letter, an employee could then type a placeholder, including “ACTBLUEXX,” into the passport field of the donor’s account. The chairmen say that placeholder let ActBlue accept every later contribution from that donor without ever asking for a passport number.
Machen, according to the letter, told Congress that ActBlue’s compliance and vetting policy was “as close to 100 percent as it could be.”
But the chairmen say he also conceded his own forensic review found ActBlue processed donations with foreign indicators even when the company couldn’t identify a passport number or other proof the donor was eligible.
Both of those things are hard to hold at once.
The letter also faults the scope of his work. Machen’s review covered only 2023. The chairmen say documents show ActBlue relaxed its vetting practices twice in 2024, the year of a presidential election, and his review never touched that data.
Joe Biden’s own former lawyer raised the alarm first
Republicans did not invent this concern. The letter points to a 2024 review by Dana Remus, who served as White House Counsel under Joe Biden and later worked as ActBlue’s outside counsel.
The chairmen say Remus allegedly found “a substantial risk that some of the funds” ActBlue raised “were impermissible contributions from foreign nationals.”
Her review reportedly found that “passport checks did not always happen” and were “never conducted” when donors paid through third-party platforms like Apple Pay or PayPal.
So a Biden White House lawyer looked at the books in real time and saw a problem. Then a second lawyer came along afterward, looked at a narrower slice, and told Congress everything was fine. The letter says Machen disputed the Remus analysis without spelling out how he reached his own findings.
ActBlue denies all of it. The company has consistently said it did nothing wrong, and it brushed off the latest letter in a statement to Fox News Digital.
“There’s nothing to see here,” ActBlue said, calling the letter “another political stunt” and claiming the probe is about “Republicans’ efforts to silence organizations they believe threaten their agenda.”
That is a strange defense from an outfit whose CEO took the Fifth in front of Congress.
What the stonewalling says about election integrity
It’s worth being careful here. No court has ruled that ActBlue broke the law, and a request for a closed-door interview is not a subpoena. Machen can still walk in and explain himself.
But the pattern is hard to miss. Democrats spent years lecturing the country about foreign interference in American elections. They treated anyone who raised questions about how elections are run as a crank. And all the while, the platform that funds their campaigns allegedly ran a citizenship check that a nine-letter placeholder could satisfy.
President Trump and the America First movement have argued for years that only American citizens should decide American elections. The SAVE Act rests on that principle, and so does every commonsense push for voter ID. Campaign money is no different. A foreign national who can’t legally vote shouldn’t be able to bankroll a candidate through a web form either.
Comer has already said ActBlue’s donations dried up once his committee started asking where they came from. Maybe that’s a coincidence. Honest donors don’t usually vanish when somebody checks the paperwork.
And there’s a bigger question hanging over all of this. If a Biden White House lawyer warned ActBlue about a “substantial risk” of foreign money back in 2024, who inside the Democrat Party knew, and who kept cashing the checks anyway?
Jordan, Steil, and Comer have the documents. They have a deadline of October 9. And they have a lawyer whose story, by their account, doesn’t line up with ActBlue’s own records.
The next step is easy to predict if Machen declines to show. A polite request becomes a subpoena, and ActBlue’s “nothing to see here” line gets a lot harder to say with a straight face.
Sources:
Fox News Digital, “Republicans zero in on key player accused of helping Democrat fundraising giant hide foreign cash,” September 28, 2026
House Judiciary Committee press release, “Chairmen Jordan, Steil, and Comer Demand Testimony about ActBlue’s Attempt to Cover Up Its Misconduct,” September 28, 2026
House Judiciary, House Administration, and House Oversight and Government Reform Committees, joint interim staff report, “Fraud on ActBlue, Part III: ActBlue’s Failure to Prevent Illegal Foreign Political Contributions,” September 2026
Washington Examiner, “House Republicans demand ActBlue lawyer testify over foreign donor vetting review,” September 28, 2026
Roll Call, “ActBlue CEO invokes Fifth Amendment to lawmakers,” June 10, 2026