The CEO of the Democratic Party’s fundraising arm took the Fifth Amendment 22 times before a congressional hearing that is investigating ActBlue’s possible acceptance of millions of dollars in fraudulent donation from foreign sources. ActBlue CEO Regina Wallace-Jones declined to answer any question put to her by the House Administration Committee, even to confirm her own name.
There’s a good reason she pled the Fifth,” explained author and investigative journalist Peter Schweizer on Fox Business this week. “And that is because her lawyers said, ‘Don’t give them anything,’” he added.
Schweizer’s Government Accountability Institute and many other investigative journalists have been looking into the story of ActBlue, which raises billions of dollars for Democrat candidates nationwide online using its own ecommerce capabilities to process donations, mostly in low-dollar amounts. Whistleblowers and journalists have charged that the organization was improperly accepting enormous foreign contributions through its system and disguising them into small-dollar donations from Americans who had given previously through ActBlue.
“The key issue here is credit card or gift card transactions from overseas,” Schweizer told the hosts of the Fox Business show The Bottom Line. “When you go online, you have that three-digit CVV code. You must have an address that matches the one on file for the credit card. And basically, ActBlue didn’t have any of that.”
“Initially, they tried to justify it by saying, ‘Well, we didn’t send them any products, so we’re not worried about it.’ The problem is that it allows fraud to go rampant. ActBlue also turned off the geolocation function that would identify where the donation was coming from,” Schweizer said. “A congressional committee obtained records and found that, for example, there were massive gift card donations coming from Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, and other countries. This is a major problem.”
Schweizer noted that the head of ActBlue had previously gone on the record saying that mistakenly accepted foreign contributions might amount to as little as 1 percent of their total intake. “Well, they raised $3.8 billion. That means they’re already admitting $38 million of foreign donations came into these campaigns. I think that number is actually a lot larger,” he said. “You’ve got all these foreign actors — oligarchs, the Chinese government, the Russian government, the Iranian government — who want to influence our elections because they stand to gain or lose, depending on who wins,” he said.
“I think this is only the beginning of this. And I think it’s going to lead to criminal referrals by Congress,” Schweizer concluded.
