Inside the drama at ActBlue - and why some Democrats are quietly afraid it could cost them in the midterms

Inside the drama at ActBlue - and why some Democrats are quietly afraid it could cost them in the midterms

By Fredreka Schouten, Annie Grayer. PUBLISHED Aug 13, 2026, 5:00 AM ET. Updated Aug 13, 2026, 2:23 PM ET.

On a Saturday morning last year, several of ActBlue's lawyers and executives gathered on a video call to discuss a sensitive matter with the fundraising platform's president and CEO.

A review by an outside law firm had raised questions about whether the organization had always taken the steps to stop illegal foreign contributions that Regina Wallace-Jones had told Congress it had.

Wallace-Jones was urged to alert ActBlue's board of directors about a potential legal vulnerability. But according to people with familiar with the discussion, Wallace-Jones flatly rejected the idea.

'I refuse to let you go to the board with this information,' she said, according to one person.

The confrontation led to the rapid departure of several key ActBlue employees and a chain of events that reverberates through Democratic campaigns more than a year later. It has given new life to probes by Republicans on Capitol Hill, who have sought to cast ActBlue as a conduit for foreign money.

'For people who work in the Democratic ecosystem, it's been a wake-up call to us that we have a vendor that is too big to fail, in effect,' said one Democratic strategist who is encouraging campaigns to use more fundraising platforms. 'And we've had to reckon with that.'

President Donald Trump last year ordered the Justice Department to investigate whether ActBlue allowed illegal straw donations and foreign contributions to infiltrate US elections. Last October, federal prosecutors in two separate US attorney's offices made initial inquiries about ActBlue's operations, according to a person familiar with the matter. Three separate GOP-led congressional committees have been probing the organization for years but have not publicly made good on threats to escalate the matter.

'There's a lot of smoke coming out of that building. I think we need to find out if there's a fire,' GOP Rep. Tom McClintock of California, who serves on one of the committees investigating ActBlue, told CNN.

Neither ActBlue nor any of its current or former employees have been charged with wrongdoing. And Democrats have roundly denounced the GOP-led probes as politically motivated attacks. Democratic lawmakers and strategists argue that investigations are instead aimed at destabilizing their party ahead of the midterms, now less than three months away.

'A lot of people just want to Monday morning quarterback,' said Democratic strategist Mike Nellis, who runs the digital fundraising and advertising firm Authentic. 'Republicans would have made hay out of anything. It doesn't matter what Regina said or did or anything else. This is all politically motivated.'

ActBlue is the small-dollar fundraising engine for the Democratic Party, with more than 20,000 campaigns and organizations using it to process online contributions. More than $19 billion has been processed through the platform since 2004, according to its website.

Starting in 2023, Republicans on Capitol Hill, citing reporting by Fox News and others, began questioning how ActBlue vetted the contributions it sends to Democrats to guard against fraud.

'We have to be above reproach because they will come up with reasons to investigate Democrats,' said one Democratic strategist working in Senate campaigns. 'And any fodder that you give them, while it may be unfair that they take this route, it's still fodder.'

The dispute revolved around memos from ActBlue's then-outside law firm, Covington & Burling, warning that some elements of a 2023 letter that Wallace-Jones had sent to Congress describing how the platform vetted contributions from foreign addresses may not have been accurate.

Wallace-Jones said in the letter that ActBlue sought US passport numbers on its contribution form for donations from foreign addresses. That was in effect for contributions made with credit cards, but it wasn't necessarily the practice followed when the contribution came through a third-party platform, such as PayPal or Venmo, Covington indicated in a February 18, 2025, memo viewed by CNN.

'This creates a substantial risk that some of the funds received were impermissible contributions from foreign nationals,' the lawyers concluded.

Two days after the Saturday meeting, Aaron Ting, then the most senior in-house lawyer at ActBlue, resigned.

'I am concerned that leadership is not fully committed to transparently addressing with the Board the seriousness of our most pressing concerns: the legal compliance of ActBlue's past practices for screening political donations from abroad and its past representations to Congress regarding foreign donations and related matters,' he said in his resignation letter, which was reviewed by CNN.

During Wallace-Jones' tenure, ActBlue's spending has soared, with operating expenses so far this cycle topping $93 million, far exceeding the roughly $67 million spent during the entire midterm cycle in 2022, Federal Election Commission records show.

Legal bills have jumped, as a battery of lawyers has been deployed to defend the organization and Wallace-Jones personally. ActBlue has spent more than $17 million on 'legal consulting' in a 17-month period between January 1, 2025, and May 31, 2026, according to FEC records.

'We are committed to standing up for our rights, and the rights of all Americans who disagree with this administration,' Wallace-Jones said of the rising the legal expenses. 'Part of fighting is retaining the best legal minds to help defend our work.'

The three committees subpoenaed five former ActBlue employees who invoked their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination 146 times or cited attorney-client privilege in declining to answer questions. Wallace-Jones similarly followed suit at a public hearing in June before Congress, repeatedly declining to respond to inquiries, including whether she lied to Congress.

In a video posted the same day she appeared on Capitol Hill, Wallace-Jones defended the platform and said invoking the Fifth is 'not an admission or even an insinuation of guilt.'

'It is the only reasonable response to a highly partisan proceeding that is about harassing its largest political opponent's fundraising platform,' she added.

As part of his order to investigate ActBlue, Trump also directed the attorney general to issue a report on its findings to the White House. It was due in October 2025, but nothing has been made public to date. Earlier this year while still the acting Justice Department head, Attorney General Todd Blanche indicated it remained a priority for the agency.

The Justice Department declined to provide any details about status of the probe to CNN, citing a policy against discussing 'ongoing' investigations.

ActBlue scored a legal victory in June when a federal judge in Boston, where ActBlue is based, halted a lawsuit against the platform brought by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is running for the US Senate.

It recently announced raising $586 million during the second quarter of 2026 for Democratic causes, candidates and organizations. ActBlue officials said that marked the strongest fundraising period in a non-presidential election season in its 22-year history.

But the alarm over potential threats to ActBlue has prompted some candidates to begin putting in place backup fundraising systems should the platform come under a debilitating attack from the Trump administration before November's election.

One Democratic House candidate has had donors ask about other donating platforms because the contributors are nervous about ActBlue.

The party strategist encouraging candidates to pursue backup fundraising tools is confident Democrats can adapt should ActBlue become seriously endangered.

'The type of people who give to our campaigns are well informed,' the person said. 'I think you'd have to say, 'Listen, Republicans have taken down ActBlue, and so I'm deeply sorry, but you're going to need to put your credit card back in.''

'They'll do it,' the person added. 'It's a little more friction, but it'll happen.'