Grandma didn’t make 3,000 donations. So who did? Here’s a graphic version of the breaking ActBlue scandal for easy consumption.
ActBlue is the engine behind nearly all Democratic small-dollar fundraising. It has processed billions of dollars in online donations. But a growing pile of evidence — from the New York Times, congressional investigators, James O’Keefe’s undercover reporters, and ActBlue’s own lawyers — now suggests the platform was a fundraising machine comprised of illegal foreign money and fake donors. Worse, internal memos show ActBlue’s leadership seemingly lied to Congress about how safe their vetting system really was.
The NYT Allegations: Foreign Donations and Misleading Congress
In April 2026, the New York Times revealed that ActBlue’s own outside lawyers at Covington & Burling had warned the company in early 2025 that its CEO may have lied to Congress. In a November 2023 letter to the House Administration Committee, ActBlue claimed it used “multilayered” screenings to block foreign donations — including passport checks for overseas donors. But the lawyers noted those safeguards were often omitted for… oh, just Apple Pay, Venmo, and PayPal. The memos warned this could be treated as a knowing, willful violation of federal law — opening the door to criminal prosecution, not just fines. Internal ActBlue records also showed at least 22 significant fraud campaigns were detected, nine of which had direct ties to foreign countries including Brazil, India, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia.
The Covington & Burling Connection and Eric Holder
The law firm that warned ActBlue about its legal exposure is Covington & Burling — one of Washington’s most powerful firms and the professional home of Eric Holder, who served as A.G. under Obama from 2009 to 2015.
Holder - you may remember - was the first Attorney General in American history to be held in Contempt of Congress for his involvement in the Fast and Furious Scandal. Holder was a partner at Covington before joining the administration and returned afterward. He’s still there as Senior Counsel. Covington also played a role in vetting VP candidates for the Harris campaign in 2024. While there is no public evidence that Holder personally worked on the ActBlue account, the connection matters: the same firm that houses a former AG with deep knowledge of federal campaign-finance enforcement was telling ActBlue that its practices could trigger criminal prosecution. ActBlue’s response was to dispute the findings — and then part ways with the firm entirely.
Full Scandal Timeline
The ActBlue scandal has been long-running. It built over years, starting with James O’Keefe’s field investigations that documented elderly Americans whose names were attached to thousands of small donations they never made. Congressional Republicans picked up the thread and began issuing subpoenas in 2024. Texas opened its own state-level probe. Then, in early 2025, ActBlue’s own lawyers at Covington & Burling delivered the most damaging blow — internal memos warning that the company may have lied to Congress and could face criminal charges. Senior staff fled. The New York Times published the chaos, which is odd. The Trump White House ordered a formal DOJ investigation. By April 2026, the full picture had come into focus: a fundraising platform processing billions of dollars, with foreign-fraud campaigns detected internally, verification steps that were skipped for major payment apps, and a leadership team that — according to its own attorneys — may have told Congress things that weren’t true.
This story is still developing, and no criminal charges have been filed as of this writing (April 3, 2026).
One hopes the DOJ has gotten their hands on the web server logs of these donation sites. I’d wager this is only part one of a foreign influence operation (i.e., CCP) that has become integrated into the Democrat Party.
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