ActBlue, the top Democratic fundraising platform that has been embroiled in years of GOP investigations over whether it improperly vetted foreign donations, is escalating efforts to clear its name.
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A law firm representing the group to review its donation history met congressional investigators Friday to present its evidence that ActBlue properly verified the source of contributions and did not mislead lawmakers about that process. But the new report is unlikely to end the problems for the group that Democrats have relied upon to process billions of dollars in campaign donations.
ActBlue’s internal review was meant to counter allegations it failed to properly vet donations, the subject of investigations by Republicans in Congress and the Justice Department at the direction of President Donald Trump.
GOP lawmakers weren’t convinced, according to a Republican who heard the briefing and spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a private meeting.
The person described ActBlue’s review as a “self-serving analysis” that probably wouldn’t affect the course of the ongoing House investigation.
ActBlue continues to operate as a vehicle for small donations to Democrats, but its future is unclear with investigations underway. The standoff is playing out with only two months left until the midterms, where money could make a difference in races that will determine control of Congress. The same goes for 2028, when Democrats hope to retake the White House.
ActBlue and its supporters have painted the Republican probes as baseless and politically motivated.
“We must continue to stand against all efforts to undermine the grassroots infrastructure that powers the Democratic Party,” ActBlue CEO Regina Wallace-Jones said in a statement to The Washington Post.
By presenting the new analysis, conducted by the law firm WilmerHale, ActBlue gave itself a chance to raise its voice in the saga after Republican attacks and reports of warnings from its lawyers.
House Republicans in 2023 asked the fundraising platform to share information about how it verified donors. Wallace-Jones responded with a letter outlining the steps she said ActBlue followed to verify contributions, including asking donors with a foreign address to provide a U.S. passport number and refunding donors who could not be reached.
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Previous lawyers for ActBlue from the firm Covington & Burling had concerns about the letter, the New York Times reported in April. In 2025, those lawyers told ActBlue that Wallace-Jones may have misled Congress in her response because the steps for vetting foreign donations were not always followed, according to the Times.
During her June appearance before Congress, Wallace-Jones declined to answer questions, repeatedly invoking the Fifth Amendment. Before her testimony, she wrote in an essay published in The Washington Post that invoking the amendment was the “only reasonable response” to a hearing she characterized as “harassing a political opponent’s fundraising platform, not genuine oversight.”
During Friday’s meeting, ActBlue’s presentation said Wallace-Jones “accurately described” how the group verified its donors, according to a copy reviewed by The Post.
In 2023, the group received $990 million in donations. Of that, only about $1.3 million came from donors with foreign addresses, according to the new analysis. ActBlue said it collected passport numbers for 93 percent of the donations with foreign addresses to verify citizenship.
In a Saturday letter to the Republican chairs of the three investigating committees, a lawyer for ActBlue wrote that the review showed foreign donations were “vanishingly rare” and that it carried out the process Wallace-Jones described in her letter in nearly all cases. The donations ActBlue processed without evidence of citizenship were “immaterial,” according to its presentation.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (Maryland), the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee that is investigating the case, said the findings of ActBlue’s review “directly refute the central premise of the Committees’ allegations.”
“The time has come for our Republican colleagues to shut down this baseless and weaponized investigation,” Raskin said in a statement.
The Republican who heard ActBlue’s presentation said the Friday briefing lacked credibility coming from a new law firm after previous ActBlue lawyers raised concerns.
“They sought out a different law firm to try to give them a different result and once they did, they came into Congress and immediately wanted to tell us this,” the person said.
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