House Republicans probe ActBlue over suspected foreign donations as staffers plead the Fifth

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan says Republicans are investigating ActBlue, the Democratic Party's primary online fundraising platform, over suspicions it accepted illegal foreign contributions and then tried to conceal the evidence from Congress.

Jordan laid out the case during an April 21 appearance on Breitbart News Daily, describing a pattern of resignations, a firing, Fifth Amendment invocations, and what he called misleading statements to Congress, all pointing, in his telling, to a fundraising operation that let foreign money flow into American elections.

The Ohio Republican did not mince words about what investigators found when they started pulling the thread.

"Their top people in their legal department dealing with fraud prevention resigned. General counsel was fired. He was given a big severance package. And then we find out their CEO was sent a letter by Congress a while back. And we find out from the news, the New York Times reported this, that the response that she gave to inquiry from Congress, according to her counsel, according to ActBlue's counsel, Covington, big law firm, they said she may have misrepresented things, which is a nice way of saying you weren't square."

Jordan then went further, saying plainly what "misrepresented" means in practice.

"You were lying to Congress. And so we're digging into all this. We put out an interim report yesterday that kind of highlights all the things going on there that sure make it look like they were taking foreign contributions, which, as you know, is against the law."

Five depositions, zero answers

The scale of the stonewalling is hard to ignore. Jordan said the Judiciary Committee deposed all five individuals, the four who resigned and the one who was fired, and every single one of them invoked Fifth Amendment protections rather than answer questions.

An interim staff report from the congressional investigation put a finer point on it: those five ActBlue fraud-prevention and legal personnel pleaded the Fifth a combined 146 times during committee depositions. The report stated bluntly, "Their unwillingness to testify only amplifies the Committees' concerns."

That same report went even further in its characterization: "The crux of this misconduct is simple: ActBlue appears to have accepted illegal foreign donations en masse and tried to cover it up, lying to and withholding information from Congress in the process."

When the people responsible for preventing fraud at a billion-dollar fundraising platform all refuse to talk, 146 times, the silence speaks volumes. Innocent organizations do not typically need their entire compliance team to take the Fifth.

The Covington connection

Jordan zeroed in on the law firm at the center of the controversy: Covington & Burling, a powerhouse Washington firm that served as ActBlue's outside counsel. It was Covington, Jordan said, that flagged the CEO's potentially misleading response to Congress.

But the connection runs deeper. Jordan pointed out that Dana Remus, who served as White House Counsel in the Biden administration, worked at Covington.

"Not just any lawyer. We're talking Dana Remus, White House Counsel in the Biden administration, who was working at that law firm... Covington law firm.... This is a tuned-in Democrat, high-profile lawyer who was the White House Counsel for President Biden."

An internal memo from Covington reportedly warned that ActBlue could be accused of accepting or facilitating foreign-national contributions. That a firm with deep ties to the Democratic establishment raised the alarm internally, and that ActBlue apparently continued operating as before, raises obvious questions about who knew what, and when.

The broader pattern of financial controversy inside Democratic fundraising operations only makes this picture more troubling.

Suspicious money, unknown donors

Jordan described a fundraising pattern during the 2024 election cycle that raised red flags well before the investigation began. ActBlue raises billions for Democrats every election cycle, he said. But something stood out.

First-time candidates, people nobody had heard of, were pulling in millions every single quarter. Jordan's reaction was the obvious one.

"No one ever heard of this person running for Congress. And that kind of money is coming in. And again, it looks like, and this is why we're digging into it, that they are taking foreign contributions."

The question "where is this money coming from?" is not rhetorical when unknown candidates suddenly have war chests that rival established incumbents. Federal election law exists precisely to prevent foreign governments and foreign nationals from buying influence in American campaigns. If ActBlue's security practices were as lax as investigators allege, the platform may have functioned as an open door.

Congress turns up the heat

The investigation is not staying at the deposition stage. House Administration Committee Chairman Bryan Steil has scheduled a May 19 hearing and formally invited ActBlue CEO Regina Wallace-Jones to testify about the platform's alleged failures in donor security, Fox News reported.

"The CEO of ActBlue needs to come clean, provide the information to Congress that we've requested," Steil said.

The pressure extends beyond testimony. Steil and Jordan wrote jointly that ActBlue's production in response to a July 2025 subpoena appeared "deliberately incomplete." Their letter warned that if ActBlue did not turn over the outstanding documents by April 28, lawmakers were prepared to pursue contempt proceedings against the CEO and compel company leadership to appear, the Washington Examiner reported.

"Given ActBlue's demonstrated history of misleading Congress, there is considerable reason to believe that ActBlue may have deliberately withheld this responsive material to impede our investigation," the lawmakers wrote.

The dispute intensified after the New York Times reported that ActBlue's own lawyers told a payment processor the group may have misled Congress about how much it had done to block foreign donations. When your own legal team is raising that flag to outside parties, the defense that everything was above board becomes difficult to maintain.

Meanwhile, the legal exposure is spreading beyond Capitol Hill. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has filed suit against ActBlue over alleged rampant donor fraud, a state-level action that opens yet another front.

Steil referenced the platform's "fundamentally unserious approach to fraud prevention" in his letter to Wallace-Jones, Newsmax reported, and said there remain "outstanding questions about whether and how ActBlue has remedied" the problem.

The irony Jordan wants you to see

Jordan did not pass up the chance to draw a contrast that conservatives have been waiting years to make. For a decade, Democrats built their political identity around the claim that foreign interference, specifically Russian interference, tainted Donald Trump's elections. The Steele dossier, the Russia investigation, the endless cable-news panels about foreign influence. All of it, Jordan argued, turned out to be baseless.

The discredited origins of the Steele dossier have been well documented. Yet the same party that spent years accusing Republicans of welcoming foreign help now faces evidence that its own fundraising apparatus may have done exactly that, not through back-channel intelligence operations, but through the front door of its primary donation platform.

"What have the Democrats been saying for 10 years? President Trump had foreign help in his election to Russia, for helping President Trump, which was all garbage. And we proved that with the whole, you know, the whole bogus dossier and everything else... but here it looks like they're doing the same."

Jordan framed the stakes in terms any voter can understand.

"You don't want foreign governments to influence your election. This is an American election. This is about our citizens, about the American people, and you don't want some foreign money contributing because, I mean, there's the potential that members are then influenced by foreign contributions."

He closed with a line that lands harder the more you think about it: "They're the ones who were doing it."

What comes next

The May 19 hearing date now looms as a potential turning point. If Wallace-Jones agrees to testify, she will face questions about resignations, a firing, a legal team that flagged potential misrepresentation, and a compliance apparatus that apparently failed to prevent what investigators describe as mass foreign donations. If she refuses, contempt proceedings are on the table.

The April 28 document deadline adds another pressure point. Three House committees, Judiciary, Administration, and presumably Oversight, given the joint letter from Jordan, Steil, and James Comer, are coordinating the investigation. ActBlue's options for running out the clock are narrowing.

Open questions remain. The specific contents of the interim report have not been made fully public. The names of the five deposed individuals have not been disclosed. And ActBlue's own account of what happened, its defense, its explanation for the resignations, its response to the Covington warning, remains largely absent from the public record. The platform and its CEO have every opportunity to tell their side at the May 19 hearing.

The broader landscape of politically motivated legal battles makes it all the more important that this investigation follows the evidence wherever it leads. And the evidence, so far, leads in one direction.

For years, Americans were told that foreign election interference was the gravest threat to democracy, but only when it could be pinned on the other side. Now the party that built a brand on that fear has its own fundraising machine under federal investigation, its own lawyers warning of foreign money, and its own staffers refusing to talk. The voters who fund American elections with their own hard-earned dollars deserve to know the truth.