by Frank Holmes, reporter
A series of explosive new developments show that, for years, the top names in Democratic politics have taken illegal campaign donations and they could now face justice—Texas style.
Since its founding, almost every Democratic politician, party organization, and cause has received money from the online funding platform ActBlue, even though investigators say the company knew most of the donations were illegal.
Now, it faces charges of fraud that could shut it down and leave Democratic candidates high-and-dry during the midterms.
The latest move comes from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who sued the organization for committing outright fraud and deception in its business practices this week.
The conservative legal enforcer took square aim at “ActBlue’s long-standing pattern and practice of tolerating rampant donor fraud on its platform so long as the fraud stayed below the radar of regulators,” stated the lawsuit, which was filed with the Tarrant County District Court on Monday.
The Democratic super-funder raised $1.78 billion of donations in 2025—and “almost $19 billion” since its founding in 2004, according to The New York Times—and took a processing fee of at least 3.7 percent of every single transaction.
It has enormous financial reserves—but, investigators have stated, they get them by evading multiple state laws and committing “federal crimes.”
First, ActBlue does not automatically cut off donations once someone has given the maximum legal contribution to a candidate. “It’s up to donors and campaigns to keep track of this,” ActBlue’s website said.
ActBlue has also accepted prepaid debit cards for years, even though it admitted they “pose a unique threat of evasion of the contribution limits.”
But the real problem, multiple investigations have found, is that ActBlue lets foreign donors—possibly from sanctioned nations like Iran, Pakistan, or China—give money directly to Democratic candidates.
“In September and October 2024 alone, ActBlue detected 237 separate donations made from foreign IP addresses using domestic prepaid debit cards. Its response was not to stop them,” said Paxton’s lawsuit. “It was to look the other way.”
The left-wing super PAC announced it had stopped taking the cards—and did stop, very briefly. “It resumed accepting them when regulatory scrutiny faded—without telling anyone,” wrote Paxton. “ActBlue’s response to rampant fraud on its platform was to make it easier.”
That means ActBlue is guilty of “lies, deceiving eligible donors and campaigns alike, when it induces them to utilize its platform by claiming it is free and safe from donor fraud—when ActBlue not only knows otherwise it actively facilitates the making of fraudulent donations,” stated the court filings. “This not only perverts the electoral process, it harms lawful donors when unlawful donors are donating to rival candidates by devaluing their valid donations.”
ActBlue was riding high. Now, the walls are closing in on all sides, the rats are jumping ship, and donors and recipients are running scared.
Paxton’s lawsuit charges ActBlue with multiple counts of violating the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act—legally Texas Business and Commerce Code § 17.46(a). He’s seeking monetary relief over $1 million—including civil penalties, reasonable attorneys’ fees, litigation expenses, and costs—and either a temporary or permanent injunction to shut down ActBlue’s dirty money train in its tracks pending trial.
But punishing ActBlue is just the tip of the iceberg.
Paxton concluded by noting that ActBlue’s illegal activity “harms campaigns who receive unlawful donations by subjecting them to potential substantial risk and exposure for violating election laws.” If the Democratic campaigns knew the donations were illegal, they could go to jail, too.
That opens the door to prosecuting practically the entire Democratic Party.
ActBlue was a major fundraiser for Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris—but it goes much, much deeper than that.
ActBlue donated more than $82 million in the off-year election of 2022 alone.
Its recipients include Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Pennsylvania Senator Jon Fetterman, Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff, Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego, Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin, Nevada Senator Jacky Rosen, Texas Senate candidate James Talarico, and so many others.
But ActBlue also funded every single layer of the Democratic Party from the top down: The Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), the Democratic Governors Association, and state parties across the country.
“Is there any Democrat, practically, in this country that doesn’t use ActBlue now?” asked Chris Jansing of MSNBC (now known as MS NOW) in 2020.
“We work with pretty much everybody at the federal level now, and we work all the way down to local school board races,” bragged then-Executive Director Erin Hill, who recently left the role.
Paxton wants to bring the gravy train to a screeching halt.
“The radical Left has relied on ActBlue as a way to funnel foreign donations and dark money into their political campaigns to subvert our laws and compromise the integrity of our elections,” said Paxton. “ActBlue lied to Congress and to the American people, and I will ensure justice is served.”
To make matters worse for ActBlue, two separate reports running more than 500 pages detailed its dubious actions—and no fewer than three House committees are hot on its trail.
BREAKING: I just filed a landmark lawsuit against ActBlue for deceiving Americans by lying about its donation processes that allow fraudulent and foreign donations. pic.twitter.com/LPsFzKACBb
— Attorney General Ken Paxton (@KenPaxtonTX) April 20, 2026
The latest allegations stem from a 120-page report from the Committee on House Administration, Committee on the Judiciary, and Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on Monday.
That follows a 476-page report on the same topic issued last April.
ActBlue’s own legal team sent the company a memo warning, “It can be alleged that ActBlue accepted and/or facilitated the acceptance of foreign-national contributions into American elections.”
Instead of listening, they closed them down and punished them, the report states.
The new report documents “the collapse of ActBlue’s legal and compliance team in the months after the 2024 election. By March 2025, every member of ActBlue’s legal and compliance team resigned, was fired, or went on extended leave from the platform.”
“Put simply: every member of ActBlue’s legal and compliance team appears to have left the platform after the 2024 election because of its ‘knowing and willful’ acceptance of illegal foreign contributions, and the subsequent cover-up,” it says.
The report notes that the five current or former ActBlue employees the committees managed to interview invoked their Fifth Amendment not to incriminate themselves 146 times.
That means the hearings were a complete shut out.
“In total, we asked them 146 questions,” said the committee’s social media account. “They refused to answer a single one, invoking their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination every time.”
The group allegedly engaged in “smurfing,” where people hide a huge donation by splitting it up under the names of many smaller straw donors.
ActBlue called the allegations a “myth,” but internal emails show the company already knew the charges were true.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has said he’s contemplating pressing federal charges against the Democratic big money PAC.
The Committees deposed five ActBlue employees, including top staff responsible for fraud prevention, to learn more about the platform’s acceptance of illegal donations—and the subsequent cover-up.
In total, we asked them 146 questions.
They refused to answer a single one,… pic.twitter.com/aIpoJvvfuZ
— House Judiciary GOP 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 (@JudiciaryGOP) April 20, 2026
The Horn told you all about the swirling legal allegations earlier this month.
So far, ActBlue spokesperson De’Andra Roberts-LaBoo has tried to laugh it off.
“If (Paxton) and his Republican allies actually cared about donor fraud, they would work to strengthen security standards across the board, including within their own operations,” Roberts-LaBoo told The Washington Post.
That logic is almost as backwards as saying if you don’t want criminals to shoot you, you should give up your own guns.
The report, the three committee chairmen said, “raises serious questions about whether ActBlue’s CEO intentionally misled Congress at the onset of this investigation.”
They’re now demanding answers.
“ActBlue weakened its fraud-prevention standards ahead of the 2024 election and coached employees to accept potentially fraudulent donations—despite knowledge of significant attempted fraud on the platform, including from foreign sources,” according to a follow-up letter sent to ActBlue CEO Regina Wallace-Jones on April 14.
ActBlue officials briefly complied with the federal investigation—but started stonewalling Congress last July. It withheld the resignation letter of Interim General Counsel Aaron Ting, which detailed the specific reasons he quit—reasons, he told The New York Times, involved blatant and willful blindness to campaign finance law.
It buried an internal message from former Legal Counsel Zain Ahmad saying the company had retaliated against him for blowing the whistle in an effort to try to clean up ActBlue’s dirty books internally, then describing ActBlue’s misleading statements to Congress.
The group has to produce all the material by next Tuesday at the close of business.
ActBlue is the main financial pillar of the Democratic Party. If it falls, it could take the entire liberal Left—and virtually every Democratic candidate in America—with it.
And it would happen just as the 2026 midterm elections kick into high gear.
Watch this column. The Horn will keep you up-to-date about what’s happening with foreign influence in our elections and the candidates who close their eyes, stick out their hands, and vote as they’re told.