ActBlue’s shady donor setup draws fed scrutiny — time for a full-on reckoning
Finally: Dem donation mega-website Act Blue is under the magnifying glass by the Treasury Department for apparently shady behavior.
The move — reported by Rep. Jim Comer (R-Ky.), the House Oversight bloodhound chasing political corruption to the left’s chagrin — includes hundreds of transactions linked to the platform.
Good news.
Trouble is, that’s only a fraction of the actual potential funny business here.
For years, congressional GOPers like Florida Sen. Marco Rubio have been on ActBlue’s case after it emerged that people whose names and addresses were linked to thousands of donations a year had no idea they’d been giving at all.
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This includes senior citizens, prime patsies for use in an unknowing straw donor scheme (which all this very obviously is, no matter what the Treasury Department says).
The attorneys general of Virginia, Missouri, Wyoming and Texas are all looking at worrying reports following a similar pattern: Single “donors” pumping money to Dems at suspicious volumes and frequencies.
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And this is by design.
ActBlue (though it eventually reversed course) for a long stretch allowed donations to go through without CVV numbers, the three-digit combos on the back of cards required in most digital transactions.
That “oopsie” makes it easier to, say, use someone else’s credit card and ID to funnel beaucoup bucks to Democrats and flout any and all election law around campaign contributions.
Heck, it could even allow foreign nationals to donate — and that’s a federal crime.
One that seems almost certain to have happened.
The House Administration Committee has found evidence suggesting ActBlue may have let through donations from Iran, Russia, China and Venezuela, and is bringing the hammer down on platform CEO Regina Wallace-Jones.
Gee, why would a donation platform not go all out when it comes to security?
Especially since it funds candidates purportedly obsessed with “election integrity”?
Couldn’t be because it wants to enable and even encourage as much donor fraud as possible to grab a huge advantage over the GOP.
ActBlue raised more than more than $2.2 billion for Democratic candidates during the 2021-’22 cycle, and will likely wind up raising more in this round, what with the White House on the line.
How much of that was legit?
The only way of knowing just how deep the fraud went — and how in on it ActBlue’s own higher-ups and the candidates themselves were — will be through a massive-post election reckoning, one that ideally brings legal consequences to both the fraudsters and their enablers.
If Dems take the White House and Congress, America can say goodbye to any chance of that ever happening.
So it’s yet another reason for anyone who actually cares about making sure our elections are on the up-and-up to vote them out.
And yet more proof, though none was needed, that the real threat to our democracy comes from the people who screech the loudest about the dangers to it.
