A damaging internal report has exposed that ActBlue’s much-publicized passport verification tool accepted donations as long as a field contained the right number of characters, regardless of whether the passport number was actually valid.
That revelation is now central to a growing legal threat facing the Democratic fundraising platform, with a senior House Republican openly predicting potential Department of Justice criminal charges.
Bryan Steil, the Wisconsin Republican who chairs the House Committee on Administration, told Fox News Digital he believes federal prosecutors will act if they conclude a crime can be proven in court.
“We know that ActBlue did not have the fraud prevention standards in place that were necessary to prevent foreign funds from finding their way, through the ActBlue platform, into Democratic campaigns and Democratic causes,” Steil said.
President Donald Trump directed then-Attorney General Pam Bondi to open a federal investigation into the Somerville, Massachusetts-based platform back in April 2025, though the current status of that probe remains unclear.
Steil’s committee, working alongside the House Oversight and Judiciary panels, has spent years scrutinizing allegations that ActBlue’s loose donor verification allowed foreign money to enter American elections.
Among the most striking developments in the investigation has been the near-universal refusal of company insiders to cooperate, with ten executives and founders invoking the Fifth Amendment across both public hearings and private interviews with investigators.
ActBlue CEO Regina Wallace-Jones was the latest to invoke that protection, doing so during a June 10, 2026 congressional hearing focused on donation transparency and verification standards.
ActBlue has consistently denied any wrongdoing, dismissing the multi-year congressional effort as a politically motivated attack, and its lawyers recently defended the new passport program in a letter to House investigators.
The letter stated the program “uses the best available technology to allow eligible donors located abroad to verify their identity using a valid U.S. passport,” describing it as a substantial engineering investment reflecting enhanced compliance systems.
Steil was unmoved, arguing the belated upgrade actually reinforced the committee’s core finding, stating it “only confirms what we’ve been saying: ActBlue failed to verify the citizenship of individuals who made donations from abroad.”
A separate internal report, first surfaced earlier this month, indicated that ActBlue employees were approving donations even when questions arose about the source of those funds.
The platform had already paused contributions from Americans living abroad in 2025, though it remains widely used by Democratic lawmakers at both the House and Senate level.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has also launched a lawsuit against ActBlue, separately alleging the platform facilitated fraudulent and foreign donations.
Steil framed the broader investigation as an opportunity to modernize American election finance law, noting that “so many of our campaign finance laws were written for a previous time” and arguing the digital fundraising era demands updated rules.
