Chairmen Jordan, Steil, and Comer Demand Testimony about ActBlue's Attempt to Cover Up Its Misconduct

During a recent briefing to the Committees, Machen asserted that "ActBlue's November 2023 letter accurately described its passport number collection and donor outreach practices, and allegations to the contrary are wrong." He conceded that his "forensic" review found that ActBlue processed and accepted donations with foreign indicators even though ActBlue failed to identify a "passport number" or "other indicia of eligibility" for the donor. Nonetheless, Machen defended Ms. Wallace-Jones's representations to Congress by arguing that ActBlue's compliance and vetting policy was "as close to 100 percent as it could be." 

Documents produced to the Committees by ActBlue undercut his assertion. These documents demonstrate that if a donor did not have a U.S. passport or a U.S. address, an ActBlue employee retained the ability to determine an "alternative method of verifying the [donor's] citizenship." This means an ActBlue employee could put "a placeholder," including "ACTBLUEXX," "in the passport number field of [the donor's] ActBlue account." The placeholder allows ActBlue to accept all subsequent contributions from the donor without requiring a U.S. passport number.

In addition, Machen's review was artificially limited in time to only 2023 and did not include an examination of donation data for 2024. As such, the review did not accurately represent the totality of ActBlue's foreign donation vetting and donor outreach practices during the 2024 election cycle. In fact, documents produced to the Committees show that ActBlue relaxed its vetting practices twice in 2024—data that his narrow "forensic" review did not capture.

Throughout the briefing, Machen disputed the accuracy of Remus's contemporaneous review that found "a substantial risk that some of the funds" raised for Democrat campaigns and causes by ActBlue "were impermissible contributions from foreign nationals." He claimed that the reporting from the New York Times, based upon Remus's memoranda could not be trusted. ActBlue continues to withhold Remus’s memoranda from the Committees.

Read the letter to Ronald Machen here.