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New York Times unravels Democrat “dark money” outfit

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by Frank Holmes, reporter

For years, Democrats assaulted President Donald Trump with phony allegations that he and other Republicans conspired with foreign nations to interfere in “our democracy.”

According to new reporting, the charges might be true, but the guilty party’s identity was wrong: It may have been Democrats who cheated the system by funneling tens of millions of dollars to thousands of candidates across the nation.

The explosive new revelations come from newly uncovered memos, internal interviews, and documents from people inside the room of one of the Democratic Party’s multibillion-dollar fundraisers.

And to eliminate any hint of media bias, the story appeared in the liberal New York Times.

ActBlue has been playing with fire, and possibly participating in illegal foreign electioneering, for decades.

The fundraising entity is one of the most important funders in the Democratic Party, allowing donors to direct money to everyone from liberal presidential hopefuls to left-wing candidates in local elections.

ActBlue bragged that it raised $1.78 billion from 52 million donors in 2025. It funded “22,700 campaigns, organizations, and committees,” including $443 million for state and local candidates, according to an ActBlue press release.

All in all, ActBlue has processed “nearly $19 billion” for Democratic campaigns since its founding in 2004, according to The New York Times.

Republicans have declared for years that ActBlue has insufficient safeguards in place to make sure the donors all live in the United States, instead of China, India, Israel, or even Iran.

When House Republicans asked for proof, ActBlue insisted there was nothing to see here.

But ActBlue’s former lawyers say then-President and CEO of ActBlue Regina Wallace-Jones may have misled Congress in a letter dated November 27, 2023.

Wallace-Jones told Congress that ActBlue uses a “multilayered” system with checks and confirmations occurring throughout the donation process to verify donors are American citizens with the right to donate money to U.S. politicians—and affect U.S. elections. For instance, she said ActBlue verified that foreign donors had a U.S. passport, or it refunded their money.

ActBlue uses “compliance measures, technological tools, and manual reviews,” which “help to ensure the identity of donors, root out potential foreign contributions, and protect donors from financial fraud,” she wrote.

But newly released memos from ActBlue’s former lawyers show that all may have been a bald-faced lie.

Foreign donors “who paid through third-party apps like Apple Pay, PayPal or Venmo were not asked for passport information,” wrote Reid Epstein in the Times.

Worse yet, ActBlue knew it, because its lawyers pointed it out, over and over again, for years.

One memo from ActBlue’s well-connected Democratic law firm, Covington and Burling, said ActBlue was so lax and lazy that there was “a substantial risk that some of the funds received were impermissible contributions from foreign nationals.” Because of these failures, it “can be alleged that ActBlue accepted and/or facilitated the acceptance of foreign-national contributions into American elections.”

It’s bad enough that officials could be charged with crimes or have their day in court.

Prosecutors “may view the November 2023 letter not just as a false statement but as an effort to conceal the foreign contributions.”

“Because ActBlue’s staff was aware that its system was not as robust as necessary, it could be alleged that these violations were ‘knowing and willful,’” which the firm warned could increase the odds of the Federal Election Commission slapping fines against ActBlue or opening the Democratic money machine to a federal criminal investigation.

“This presents a substantial risk for ActBlue,” said Covington and Burling.

One of the firm’s attorneys—Dana Remus, who worked as a lawyer in the Biden administration—told Wallace-Jones in a video call that she had personally acted so recklessly that she might need her own lawyer to fend off federal charges.

If convicted and given the most severe penalty, violators who illegally took foreign campaign contributions face up to five years in prison and $250,000 in fines.

The firm presented three options, including correcting the record explicitly, and it warned officials could face serious consequences if they just let its false statements stand.

Instead of cleaning up its act, ActBlue fired Covington and Burling and accused it of serving up legal “counsel that bordered on malpractice.”

Wallace-Jones said her reassurances to Congress do not constitute perjury, because it was “accurate in the context in which they were written.”

ActBlue decided to cover its tracks at all costs.

“We weren’t going to poke the bear by issuing a correction for things that, frankly, the committee hadn’t necessarily looked at more closely,” Kimberly Peeler-Allen, the chairwoman of the ActBlue board of directors, told the Times.

Besides, she said, there’s nothing to worry about. Foreign donations make up a tiny slice of its multibillion-dollar revenue.

Peeler-Allen told the Times that the amount of money officials thought might come from overseas amounted to “less than one percent” of ActBlue’s fundraising haul.

But the toughest-talking Texan in Washington isn’t buying it.

“First of all, certainly looks like that’s not the case. But one percent of their money is something like $38 or $40 million dollars, if you just do the basic math. And I don’t accept or believe that it’s just one percent,” said Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas.

Even the leak itself should raise eyebrows, said one lawyer.

“Someone leaked this to The New York Times. And it’s either someone at Act Blue,” said Laura Ingraham of Fox News, who is a trained lawyer, “or someone at Covington and Burling, who was very uncomfortable, because then they could be linked to this.”

“Something here is very, very fish beyond the substance of this report itself,” said Ingraham.

Republicans, who began investigating ActBlue years ago at President Trump’s insistence, say this proves their suspicions right.

“Our investigation found ActBlue’s internal fraud prevention measures were wholly insufficient for preventing illegal foreign campaign donations,” wrote Congressmen Bryan Steil of Wisconsin, Jim Jordan of Ohio, and James Comer of Kentucky in a press release reacting to the Times story. “Today’s reporting reconfirms that finding and raises serious questions about whether ActBlue’s CEO intentionally misled Congress at the onset of this investigation.” Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas called the story “yet another example of the Left’s embrace of fraud. Everyone involved must face the full weight of the law.”

“I imagine it will turn into criminal indictments by the Justice Department (for) a lot of people, including potentially this former head of ActBlue,” Mike Davis of the Article III Project told Steve Bannon’s War Room.

And the Trump administration’s top cop just confirmed he’s looking into things.

“That is a a priority of this administration and this Department of Justice and it’s something that a lot of people have been worried about it for a VERY long time,” Todd Blanche, who has taken the reins at the Justice Department after President Trump sidelined Attorney General Pam Bondi this week, told Fox News host Jesse Watters. “And you should rest assured that it includes the Department of Justice, and it includes me.”

Democrats are also outraged, but not because they’re guilty of foreign election interference. They’re sweating over the possibility that they’ll lose one of their top fundraising sources.

“Democrats are nervous that any additional upheaval at ActBlue could destabilize the party’s critical fund-raising apparatus ahead of the midterm elections,” reported Reid Epstein in The New York Times.

For Democrats, everything comes down to politics.

They falsely accuse Republicans of taking foreign donations even as they have their own hands in the till.

They launch pointless investigations against elderly Trump voters who were anywhere near Washington on January 6 but let BLM rioters burn down police stations in Democrat-run cities.

They claim to stand up for the little man in American politics while taking huge contributions from foreign-born billionaires to fundamentally transform America.

With Pam Bondi gone and this report out in the open, Americans can finally hope someone on the Left will face justice.

About the Author

Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”