Five current and former ActBlue employees refused to answer a single substantive question during congressional depositions, invoking their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination a combined 146 times, according to an interim staff report released Monday by three House committees investigating the Democratic fundraising platform.
The report, issued jointly by the House Administration, Oversight, and Judiciary Committees, paints a picture of an organization that loosened its own fraud-prevention standards during an election year, lost virtually its entire legal and compliance team, and then stonewalled the congressional investigators who came asking why.
ActBlue, which has raised nearly $19 billion for Democratic causes since 2004, called the investigation "partisan" and said its employees were exercising a foundational constitutional right. The committees say the platform may have accepted illegal foreign donations on a mass scale and then tried to cover it up.
The depositions took place between July and December 2025, the New York Post reported. Two ActBlue officials and three former lawyers "declined to answer a single one of the Committees' substantive questions." The report did not mince words about what that silence means for the investigation.
From the report itself:
"Not a single employee offered testimony that could help ensure that American elections are free, fair, and decided by Americans alone."
The committees went further, stating that the "crux of this misconduct is simple: ActBlue appears to have accepted illegal foreign donations en masse and tried to cover it up, lying to and withholding information from Congress in the process." The report added: "It is not only the Committees that allege this, it is what ActBlue's own outside lawyers found during a legal review of the platform's fraud-prevention practices and statements to Congress."
That last line refers to a February 2025 internal memo authored by Covington & Burling, the outside law firm representing ActBlue. The memo found that changes to ActBlue's donation standards carried legal risks and that it could "be alleged that ActBlue accepted and/or facilitated the acceptance of foreign-national contributions into American elections", conduct the memo said would be "in violation of federal law."
In other words, ActBlue's own attorneys flagged the problem. And the platform's employees still refused to talk about it under oath.
The investigation did not begin with silence. The committees issued subpoenas in two rounds. In June 2025, they subpoenaed an unidentified ActBlue senior workflow specialist who managed fraud prevention, along with Alyssa Twomey, a former vice president who oversaw the fraud-prevention team during the 2024 election year.
A second round of subpoenas followed in September 2025, targeting former general counsel Darrin Hurwitz, ex-director and associate general counsel Aaron Ting, and former counsel Zain Ahmad. The report indicated that Hurwitz, Ting, and Ahmad appeared to have faced retaliation for raising concerns about lax fraud-vetting standards, essentially, for blowing the whistle internally.
The pattern of alleged misconduct among Democratic officials and operatives is hardly new. Recent ethics proceedings against another Democratic lawmaker show how rarely institutional accountability follows allegations of wrongdoing on the left.
Committee chairs Bryan Steil of Wisconsin, James Comer of Kentucky, and Jim Jordan of Ohio accused ActBlue of having "withheld materials responsive to the Committees' subpoenas", specifically records connected to reporting by the New York Times on the Covington & Burling memo. The chairs said the testimony refusals and subpoena evasion made it necessary to seek "additional information about ActBlue's fraud-prevention practices for foreign donations dating back to 2020."
The report also cited ActBlue CEO Regina Wallace-Wells for seemingly making "false statements to Congress" and withholding documents pursuant to a subpoena for records. The specific statements in question were not detailed in the report's public findings.
Internal documents previously exposed by the New York Post showed that ActBlue made its donation standards "more lenient" twice during the 2024 election year. Breitbart reported that the House report described ActBlue as having deliberately weakened its fraud-prevention policies despite internal assessments showing the changes would increase fraudulent contributions.
The timeline is worth pausing on. ActBlue loosened its standards in 2024. By February 2025, its own outside lawyers had produced a memo warning that the changes could expose the platform to allegations of facilitating illegal foreign donations. By March 2025, every member of ActBlue's legal and compliance team had resigned, been fired, or gone on extended leave.
That is not the profile of an organization confident in its own compliance. That is the profile of an organization in crisis, one whose internal safeguards collapsed at the very moment they were most needed.
The committees allege ActBlue allowed bad actors, including foreign actors, to exploit the platform for fraudulent political donations. The question of foreign money flowing into American elections strikes at the heart of election integrity, a concern that transcends partisan lines, or ought to.
Concerns about foreign influence in American political campaigns have surfaced in other contexts, underscoring how porous the guardrails around our elections have become.
ActBlue pushed back through a spokesperson, framing the investigation as politically motivated and the Fifth Amendment invocations as principled.
"The Fifth Amendment is one of America's most foundational constitutional rights. ActBlue employees who invoked their rights in the face of a partisan investigation are doing exactly what the Founders intended."
The spokesperson added a warning aimed at Republicans:
"If we allow Republicans to trample on our protected rights, it will only empower them to attack more organizations and individuals they disagree with."
ActBlue also maintained through a spokesperson that it has "always been forthcoming with Congress." That claim sits uneasily beside the committees' finding that the organization withheld subpoenaed materials and that its CEO made seemingly false statements to Congress.
No one disputes the right to invoke the Fifth Amendment. The Constitution guarantees it. But invoking it 146 times across five employees, while your own lawyers' memo warns of federal law violations and your compliance team has evaporated, is not the posture of an organization with nothing to hide. It is the posture of an organization that has calculated the legal risk of answering honestly.
The congressional report was not the only blow ActBlue absorbed on Monday. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit against the platform, alleging "rampant donor fraud." Paxton's suit drew on the committee findings, the New York Times reporting on the Covington & Burling memo, and determinations from investigators in his own office who were able to make donations under fake identities.
That last detail is striking. If state investigators can successfully donate to political campaigns through ActBlue using fabricated identities, the platform's fraud-prevention systems are not merely lax, they are functionally nonexistent for anyone determined to exploit them.
The growing catalog of questionable financial conduct in Democratic political operations makes the ActBlue revelations harder to dismiss as isolated.
The interim report raises as many questions as it answers. What specific statements by CEO Regina Wallace-Wells does the committee consider false? What documents were withheld, and what do they contain? What were the exact questions the five employees refused to answer 146 times? And how much foreign money, if any, actually flowed through ActBlue's weakened safeguards into American campaigns?
The committees have signaled this is an interim report, not a final one. More subpoenas, more depositions, and potentially referrals could follow. The Paxton lawsuit will proceed on its own track in Texas.
Meanwhile, ActBlue continues to operate as the dominant fundraising engine for the Democratic Party, a platform that has moved nearly $19 billion since 2004 and whose internal controls, by its own lawyers' assessment, may have allowed illegal foreign money into American elections.
The broader pattern of Democratic institutional misconduct drawing slow or reluctant accountability makes it all the more important that these committees follow the evidence wherever it leads.
When the people who built the system refuse to explain how it works, the rest of us are entitled to assume the answer wouldn't look good under oath.
