WASHINGTON — House Republican investigators say Democratic fundraising giant ActBlue ran a passport check that did little more than count characters — and that staff could skip future checks with the placeholder “ACTBLUEXX” — in a Sept. 16, 2026, interim staff report titled “Fraud on ActBlue, Part III.”

The joint report from the Committees on House Administration, Judiciary, and Oversight and Government Reform alleges ActBlue’s March 2024 “passport verification” feature “uses very basic validation—number of characters” and does “not verify the information in any other way,” including against a government database. Internal procedures described in the report say employees could place “ACTBLUEXX” in a donor’s passport field after an “alternative” citizenship review, allowing later contributions without a U.S. passport number.

The report also says supervisors repeatedly told fraud-prevention analysts to “give the donor the benefit of the doubt” despite foreign red flags — including examples of approvals for donors with Hong Kong IPs, foreign cards, prepaid cards, or social-media checks used as identity proof. Earlier committee work, cited again here, alleged ActBlue took a “more lenient approach” to fraud prevention in 2024 even after detecting significant fraud campaigns, some from foreign sources.

On counsel memos: the report reprises New York Times reporting that outside counsel and former Biden White House Counsel Dana Remus drafted memoranda concluding CEO Regina Wallace-Jones may have misled Congress about overseas-donation review, and that acceptance of illegal foreign contributions appeared “knowing and willful.” According to that cited reporting, Remus’s team urged correcting the record; Wallace-Jones later terminated the firm. Those are allegations and attributed legal opinions — not adjudicated findings.

ActBlue denied wrongdoing. In a statement to Fox News Digital, the group called the latest push “another political stunt,” said a third-party forensic analysis had undercut a central GOP claim, and framed the probe as an effort “to silence organizations they believe threaten their agenda.” Democrats have denounced the investigation as undermining election confidence; chairmen Bryan Steil, Jim Jordan, and James Comer cast it as rooting out foreign money risks on a platform that concentrates small-dollar Democratic fundraising. Concentrated payment rails and weak verification matter regardless of which party benefits — federal law still bars foreign nationals from funding U.S. campaigns.

Sources