ActBlue spent years presenting itself as the clean, frictionless engine of Democratic small-dollar fundraising.
Now House Republicans want the lawyer who helped clear that machine of wrongdoing to explain why his conclusions appear to collide with ActBlue’s own records.
House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, House Administration Chairman Bryan Steil and House Oversight Chairman James Comer have summoned attorney Ronald Machen for a closed-door interview before October 9. Their request centers on a September 11 briefing in which Machen defended an after-the-fact forensic review of ActBlue’s safeguards against illegal foreign donations.
The problem is not a minor disagreement over wording. The chairmen say Machen’s account contradicts evidence already produced to their committees.
The official committee announcement laid out the conflict plainly:
NEW: Chairmen @Jim_jordan, @RepBryanSteil, and @RepJamesComer demand testimony from ActBlue’s outside counsel who conducted an after-the-fact “forensic” review that claims ActBlue and its CEO did nothing wrong.
This directly contradicts former ActBlue outside counsel Dana Remus’s findings that the Democrat fundraising platform had substantial risk of illegal foreign donations and misrepresentations to Congress.
She even put it in memoranda but they won’t produce it to the Committees.
They want us to take their word and believe everything they say.
Give me a break.
Read more: https://t.co/0LTwsFEVVj
— House Judiciary GOP
(@JudiciaryGOP) September 28, 2026
According to the House Judiciary Committee, Machen told congressional staff that ActBlue’s system came as close to perfect compliance as reasonably possible.
But the committees say a contemporaneous 2024 review led by Dana Remus—another outside lawyer for ActBlue and a former Biden White House counsel—found a “substantial risk” that some money processed by the platform came from foreign nationals barred from contributing to American campaigns.
The committee says Remus documented those concerns in memoranda that ActBlue still has not produced. Lawmakers also say the earlier review flagged possible misrepresentations to Congress, turning a technical compliance dispute into a question about whether investigators received a complete account.
That is a very different picture from a system operating near 100 percent effectiveness.
The most damaging details involve the basic question of whether donors who raised foreign red flags were actually required to prove U.S. eligibility.
Fox News Politics reported that passport checks did not always occur and were allegedly never conducted for donations made through Apple Pay or PayPal. Internal records cited by the committees also showed that employees could enter a placeholder such as “ACTBLUEXX” in the passport field, allowing later contributions to proceed without a U.S. passport number.
That allegation goes straight to the heart of the dispute:
ActBlue denies wrongdoing and calls the investigation political. The current letter requests an interview; it is neither an indictment nor a subpoena.
Still, “political stunt” is not an answer to a documentary contradiction. If one legal review identified serious exposure while another later declared the safeguards essentially sound, Congress is entitled to ask what changed, which evidence each lawyer reviewed and why the public should trust the more comforting conclusion.
The broader investigation has already produced an extraordinary wall of silence. Jordan said every one of the ten ActBlue witnesses deposed by the committees invoked the Fifth Amendment.
Invoking the Fifth is a constitutional right and establishes no guilt. Ten silent insiders and sharply conflicting legal reviews nevertheless give Congress ample reason to demand specific, sworn answers.
Campaign-finance law does not become optional because a fundraising platform processes millions of small donations. Foreign nationals are prohibited from financing American elections, and the larger the platform, the greater its obligation to build safeguards that cannot be bypassed with a dummy entry.
Machen now has an opportunity to explain the methodology behind his review, the records he relied on and the gaps the committees say he missed. ActBlue has an opportunity to produce the memoranda and show that its public defense matches its private findings.
If the system was as effective as Machen suggested, the evidence should support him. If it was not, Americans deserve to know how much foreign-linked money slipped through, who knew about the weakness and why Congress received a rosier story.
A political money machine handling billions of dollars should expect nothing less than that level of scrutiny.
This is a Guest Post from our friends over at 100 Percent Fed Up. View the original article here.
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[ H/T WLT Report ]
