One of the biggest liberal fundraising arms working to support former Vice President Joe Biden and other Democratic causes may be in a heap of trouble.
A new forensic analysis exposes troubling questions about the hundreds of millions of dollars raised by the online platform ActBlue used to fund progressives’ campaigns.
And experts warn this discovery could mean some of that cash is coming from shady players, possibly even overseas sources seeking to influence the 2020 U.S. election.
Worse yet, the very nature of these difficult-to-trace funds could mean that voters will never know the truth about who’s really behind Biden.
The organization Take Back Action Fund says its analysis of money raised by ActBlue in 2019 finds that nearly half of all donations came from people who are unemployed…
“Our biggest concern is foreign money. Do you really believe that half of the people who are giving money through ActBlue don’t have a job?” The organization’s president. John Pudner, told The Washington Times. “To me, that just seems absurd.”
Contributions from small donors might sound like grassroots supporters… and money from the unemployed might seem like the touching tale of someone using the little they have to support a “worthy” cause.
But election-watchers say there could be something much more sinister at play.
Donors who contribute less than $200 don’t have to be listed individually on FEC forms. Those same forms also track employers – but making contributions of $199 or less is essentially untraceable on almost any level.
“ActBlue’s structure could easily allow illegal donations made online to be broken down into smaller gifts from claimed U.S. sources with little chance of exposure,” former Kansas Attorney General Phil Kline wrote in an op-ed for RealClearPolitics. “ActBlue’s design would allow large donors to exceed contribution limits without even triggering the threshold for public reporting.”
ActBlue denies any improprieties.
But its numbers stand out when compared to the money raised by the conservative group WinRed.
Fox News reports that just 4 percent of the WinRed’s 2019 money came from either the unemployed or people who did not list an employer, rising to just 5.6 percent this year so far.
What’s more, Pudner told Fox News that ActBlue receives a large portion of its funds via prepaid gift cards.
Credit cards are verified by banks, while gift cards can be purchased by anyone and used under any name “meaning someone could buy endless gift cards and list any name they wanted and leave the employer line blank or type in words like ‘not employed,’ ‘unemployed,’” Pudner said.
President Donald Trump and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. – two people who’ve been on the other end of the left’s big-money machine – spoke out on Twitter:
Fake Liberal Democrat Donors. Money laundering anyone? https://t.co/BAVgQXUS5n
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 12, 2020
Graham demanded an investigation of what he called a “fishy as hell” scheme:
I urge the @FEC and others to investigate this situation. Is money being laundered through @ActBlue from straw donors or foreign governments to Democratic candidates, or is this legit? Somebody needs to find out ASAP.
— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) September 12, 2020
The system appears to have originated in the 2008 race, when then-Sen. Barack Obama essentially weaponized small-donor fundraising for his ultimately successful presidential campaign.
At the time, the Washington Post warned that the campaign’s acceptance of “largely untraceable prepaid credit cards” could be used to “evade limits on how much an individual is legally allowed to give or to mask a contributor’s identity.”
It wasn’t just an “in theory” exercise.
The newspaper said campaign finance filings revealed “donors” with names such as Doodad Pro and Es Esh.
“They have opened the floodgates to all this money coming in,” Sean Cairncross, then the chief counsel to the Republican National Committee, told the newspaper at the time. “I think they’ve made the determination that whatever money they have to refund on the back end doesn’t outweigh the benefit of taking all this money upfront.”
Now, a dozen years later, we could be seeing where the road has taken us.
“Something about ActBlue’s finances smells awfully rotten, and the American public shouldn’t settle for simply holding its nose,” wrote Kline. “We all deserve answers to ensure safe and fair elections in America.”
— Walter W. Murray is a reporter for The Horn News. He is an outspoken conservative and a survival expert, and is the author of “America’s Final Warning.”