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FIRST ON FOX: House Republicans’ investigation into Democrats’ main fundraising platform is heating up on the heels of an explosive report that raised questions about whether left-wing candidates’ campaigns were raking in foreign cash.
Top House GOP committee chairs are summoning ActBlue attorney Ronald Machen for a closed-door interview sometime before Oct. 9, Fox News Digital has learned. A letter sent to Machen Monday morning stated that information he previously disclosed to investigators appears to contradict other data that has been collected, specifically on ActBlue’s verification standards for making sure a donor is a U.S. citizen.
“On September 11, 2026, you provided a briefing to the House Administration, Judiciary, and Oversight and Government Reform Committees regarding the accuracy of ActBlue CEO Regina Wallace-Jones’s prior statements to Congress about ActBlue’s donor and passport collection processes,” the letter said.
“Your review appears to be nothing more than an after-the-fact sugarcoating of ActBlue’s misconduct and Ms. Wallace-Jones’s misrepresentations to the House Administration Committee.”
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The letter was sent by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Wis., Committee on House Administration Chairman Bryan Steil, R-Wis., and House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., who lead the panels probing ActBlue.
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ActBlue is a massive platform for campaigns to raise money that’s used by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and the Democratic leaders of the House and Senate, among others.
Republican lawmakers have long accused the company of having lax verification standards for donors, something ActBlue has said it actively improved since the start of the GOP’s probe. But a new report released earlier this month, first reported by Fox News Digital, appears to show employees green-lighting donations despite some questions about where they came from.
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Chief among the GOP’s concerns is ActBlue’s passport number verification. According to the report, the field only requires the correct number of characters for a U.S. passport number rather than a valid code for a donation to be accepted.
The Monday letter also points to a 2024 “contemporaneous review by ActBlue’s then-outside counsel, former Biden White House Counsel Dana Remus” which allegedly found “‘a substantial risk that some of the funds’ raised for Democrat campaigns and causes by ActBlue ‘were impermissible contributions from foreign nationals.'”
Remus’ review further found that “passport checks did not always happen” and were “never conducted” when donations were made using third-party fiscal platforms like Apple Pay or PayPal, the letter said.
The Republican chairs said Machen’s prior comments to Congress “conceded that your ‘forensic’ review found that ActBlue processed and accepted donations with foreign indicators even though ActBlue failed to identify a ‘passport number’ or ‘other indicia of eligibility’ for the donor.
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“Nonetheless, you defended Ms. Wallace-Jones’s representations to Congress by arguing that ActBlue’s compliance and vetting policy was ‘as close to 100 percent as it could be,'” the letter said.
“Documents produced to the Committees undercut your assertion. These documents demonstrate that if a donor did not have a U.S. passport or a U.S. address, an ActBlue employee retained the ability to determine an ‘alternative method of verifying the [donor’s] citizenship.’ This means an ActBlue employee could put ‘a placeholder,’ including ‘ACTBLUEXX,’ ‘in the passport number field of [the donor’s] ActBlue account.’ The placeholder allows ActBlue to accept all subsequent contributions from the donor without requiring a U.S. passport number.”
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The letter said Machen’s review was also limited to 2023, arguing it left out potentially valuable information about 2024.
“As such, the review did not accurately represent the totality of ActBlue’s foreign donation vetting and donor outreach practices during the 2024 election cycle. In fact, documents produced to the Committees show that ActBlue relaxed its vetting practices twice in 2024—data that your narrow ‘forensic’ review did not capture,” the letter said.
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It also charged that he disputed Remus’ analysis without going into detail on how he established his own findings.
ActBlue has consistently denied any wrongdoing and dismissed Republicans’ most recent findings in a statement to Fox News Digital.
“There’s nothing to see here. After we released findings of a third-party forensic analysis that completely undermined a central claim that they have made against ActBlue, Republicans are refusing to move on,” ActBlue said. “Instead, they are orchestrating another political stunt before rushing out of town weeks early to go campaign. This coordinated campaign against ActBlue isn’t about the facts, or legislating, it’s about Republicans’ efforts to silence organizations they believe threaten their agenda.”
A closed-door interview summons is not the same as a subpoena, which is a legally binding order.
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