by Fred Lucas
Three House committee chairs are asking a former Biden White House counsel to comply with their investigation into Democrat fundraising platform ActBlue, after the counsel in her private practice issued a blistering review of ActBlue’s process for screening out foreign contributions.
The congressional scrutiny of ActBlue traces back to 2023, when investigative journalist James O’Keefe released a series of videos highlighting what he described as widespread “smurfing” — the practice of making numerous small donations in the names of individuals who later denied authorizing them. Those reports, which featured donors expressing shock at hundreds or thousands of micro-donations attributed to their names in FEC filings, prompted multiple state attorneys general to open investigations and spurred the House Administration Committee to begin formal oversight.
Since then, the probe has expanded through multiple rounds of letters, subpoenas, and hearings. In October 2023, House Administration Chairman Bryan Steil demanded information on ActBlue’s donor verification practices, particularly the acceptance of contributions without CVV codes. The effort intensified with joint reports from the Judiciary, Oversight, and Administration Committees detailing alleged vulnerabilities to foreign donations, staff resignations in the legal and compliance teams, and potential misstatements by ActBlue officials to Congress. A June 2026 hearing featured ActBlue CEO Regina Wallace-Jones invoking her Fifth Amendment rights on multiple questions.
Dana Remus, the former White House counsel, is now a partner at the Democrat-leaning Washington, D.C., law firm Covington & Burling LLP, contracted to perform a review of ActBlue. The Remus-led review criticized the platform’s safeguards against illegal foreign donations and also said that ActBlue CEO Regina Wallace-Jones possibly misled Congress on fraud concerns.
The letter to Remus is from House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio; House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman James Comer, R-Ky.; and House Administration Committee Chairman Bryan Steil, and is based largely on New York Times reporting on the clash between ActBlue and Covington & Burling.
“According to the Times, after the 2024 election, you prepared and delivered to ActBlue two memoranda concerning fraud on the platform and ActBlue’s response to it,” the letter says. “Because you have firsthand information about ActBlue’s response to allegations of pervasive fraud on its platform, the Committees write to request your voluntary cooperation with our oversight efforts,” the letter adds.
ActBlue, a Democrat fundraising juggernaut that hauled in $3.82 billion in the 2024 election cycle, has consistently denied any wrongdoing in the matter. The group has said it has a strenuous process to prevent fraudulent or foreign donations, and it blamed House Republicans and the Trump administration for pushing what it calls a partisan investigation. It has also been critical of Covington & Burling.
A Remus memo found “it could be alleged that [ActBlue’s] violations” of federal campaign finance law “were ‘knowing and willful.,” according to the letter. It notes another memorandum addressed allegations that Wallace-Jones may have made “false or misleading” statements to the Committee on House Administration in 2023 about preventing suspicious donations.
“You found that there was a risk of prosecutors concluding that Ms. Wallace-Jones misrepresented ActBlue’s use of passport verification tools for donations with signs of foreign origin, because such fraud-prevention ‘steps’ ‘were not always followed,’” the letter says.
The letter notes that ActBlue called the Covington & Burling team “tardy” and “unprepared,” and said its work “bordered on malpractice.”
“It is remarkable that ActBlue so publicly smeared you, especially given your service for President Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign and as White House Counsel during the Biden-Harris administration,” the three House chairmen said in the letter to Remus.
In April, ActBlue posted a response to the New York Times reporting on the Covington & Burling findings, asserting, “the truth is a very different story than what is being reported.”
“Our CEO, Regina Wallace-Jones, never made false statements to Congress,” the response says. “Her correspondence was reviewed and approved by multiple in-house and outside attorneys before it was submitted. That includes the same former attorneys who are now characterizing it differently to the press.”
The ActBlue statement continues: “More than a year after approving the letter, those attorneys raised concerns about potential misinterpretation by bad-faith actors. Our CEO informed the board immediately and brought in additional outside counsel to inform our path forward.”
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