ActBlue, the Democrats’ main online fundraising platform, has told Congress it is starting passport checks on donors who give from outside the country. Its attorneys said so in a letter sent to House investigators on Monday, October 5, and the Republicans leading the probe say the move is an admission that ActBlue had not been confirming those donors were American citizens.
Story Highlights
- ActBlue’s letter describes a new program that checks a donor’s identity against a valid U.S. passport.
- Rep. Bryan Steil says the new program confirms ActBlue “failed to verify the citizenship” of donors abroad.
- ActBlue says it described its checks to Congress accurately and calls the change a further upgrade.
- Ten top figures at ActBlue have invoked the Fifth Amendment in the House investigation.
What ActBlue Has Now Admitted By Its Own Action
Federal law bars foreign nationals from giving money to American campaigns. For more than a year, three House committees have been asking whether ActBlue checked that donors giving from overseas were citizens. ActBlue’s answer to the charge was short. “There’s nothing to see here,” the platform said, adding that Republicans “are refusing to move on.”
Democrats' largest campaign fundraising platform says it has strengthened its donor verification standards days after House GOP investigators accused it of potentially taking in foreign donations for U.S. campaigns.
It's a game. The Congress funding democratic "Humanitarian,… pic.twitter.com/Xf8ZluCfjk— Vladimir Sokolski (@VSokolski67631) October 6, 2026
The letter says the program “adds passport-based identity verification” to the checks ActBlue already had. It lets a U.S. citizen living abroad donate again by proving who they are “using a valid U.S. passport.” ActBlue stopped taking all donations from outside the country in 2025, so the program reopens a door that has been shut since then.
Republicans read the letter another way. If a real passport check is new, they say, then no real passport check was in place before. That is their argument, and it rests on ActBlue’s own words about what the program adds.
What The Investigators Say It Proves
Rep. Bryan Steil, a Wisconsin Republican, chairs the House Administration Committee, the House panel that oversees federal election law. He said the “NEW passport verification program only confirms what we’ve been saying: ActBlue failed to verify the citizenship of individuals who made donations from abroad.” He added that the policy “should have been in place on day one.”
The House Judiciary Committee, led by Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, and the House Oversight Committee, led by Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, are working the case with Steil. A spokesperson for Jordan said the move shows the platform’s fraud defenses “were not as robust” as ActBlue chief executive Regina Wallace-Jones told Congress.
The three committees put out a staff report, a written summary of findings by committee investigators, on September 16. It says ActBlue’s old passport step only counted the number of characters a donor typed and did not check that the number was real. The report also says supervisors told fraud analysts to “give the benefit of the doubt to the donor.”
What ActBlue Says In Its Defense
ActBlue says it “accurately described” its checks to Congress. It says it took the “proactive step” of suspending donations from outside the United States in 2025, amid what it called “unprecedented attacks” from President Trump and his allies. The platform says the passport program lets eligible Americans abroad take part again while it keeps “robust security and compliance standards.”
ActBlue also points to a forensic analysis, a detailed outside review of its records, that it sent to the committees on September 12. By ActBlue’s account, that review found donations from foreign addresses made up 0.13% of the dollars it handled in 2023, and passport numbers were collected for about 93% of them.
Where The Investigation Stands
No source has shown that foreign money reached Democratic campaigns through ActBlue. Republicans say that is what they are trying to measure. Steil said he, Jordan and Comer want to know what share of the billions of dollars that passed through ActBlue came from illegal foreign sources.
Ten top figures at ActBlue, including executives and founders, have invoked the Fifth Amendment, the constitutional right to refuse to answer questions that could be used against a person in a criminal case. Steil said the committees “will continue to seek answers for the American people.”
Sources:
foxnews.com, cha.house.gov, actblue.com
