Money in politics is troublesome enough, but when it knowingly comes from foreign sources, it’s also illegal. That is the problem for ActBlue, the official fundraising platform for Democratic Party candidates that has been under investigation for doing exactly that.
It just got worse.
This week, ActBlue’s lawyers told the House of Representatives that the platform will now actively verify U.S. passport numbers that are input by online donors as part of its “ongoing investment in the security of contributions processed from donors located abroad,” Fox News reported. Unfortunately, that is an admission ActBlue has not previously done this during years of fundraising.
The news startles Eric Eggers, co-host of The Drill Down podcast: “Imagine if your employee came to you and said, ‘Hey boss, good news! I quit drinking whiskey at lunch,’” Eggers says. “You’d say, ‘That’s great, but does that mean you’ve been drinking whiskey at lunch for the last several years?’”
Host Peter Schweizer quips, “That could also mean they’ve switched to vodka!”
Republicans on the oversight committee have for years accused ActBlue of having insufficient verification standards for weeding out illegitimate campaign donations. Under U.S. election law, foreigners may not contribute to U.S. political campaigns.
ActBlue collected billions of dollars for Democratic candidates without doing rudimentary safety checks that ensure online donations come only from valid U.S. givers. For years, ActBlue did not even check for a valid CVV number (Card Verification Value), a basic security measure followed by all online merchants. Several senior ActBlue officials resigned and its CEO, Regina Wallace-Jones, as Schweizer noted in a media appearance at the time, took the Fifth Amendment 22 times when she was called to answer questions.
None of this surprises Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute (GAI) and bestselling author of several books on foreign interference in American politics. “At GAI, we’ve been on this for more than a decade,” Schweizer says. GAI did an investigative report in 2017 that found the percentage of Congressional Republicans with active donation pages requiring CVV verification was 91.3 percent in 2016. On the other hand, CVV usage by Democrat members of Congress with active donation pages in that election year was just 8.3 percent.
Schweizer notes the new interim joint report from the Oversight, Judiciary, and House Administration committees highlighted internal ActBlue email threads. ActBlue repeatedly instructed its fraud prevention analysts to “give the donor the benefit of the doubt” and to ignore red flags about contributions with foreign indicators. In addition, ActBlue previously did have a “passport number” textbox on its online donation form, the committee found, but all it did was count that the input contained the correct number of digits.
“In one email thread, an analyst rejected a donation with several ‘red flags,’” Schweizer notes on the show. “The supervisor reviews it and says, ‘I disagree with this reject. You are right that their IP [internet address] and billing are mismatched and a Romanian IP definitely raises some questions, but you wrote in the case comment that their name on their X profile is different, but when I click it, it looks like the same name.’”
“This is a problem for a lot of political campaigns. The Associated Press did an investigation last year and found that the Trump campaign over the past five years had 1,600 contributions from donors who lived abroad, had close ties to foreign interests, or failed to disclose basic information, making it difficult — if not impossible — to identify them and verify the legality of their donations,” Schweizer notes. “Mayor Mamdani, the mayor of New York City, has a lot of support in the Muslim community. National News Desk reported that in his 2025 campaign, he received $13,000 in donations from 170 foreign donors. Those are just the ones that were detected.”
“This shows that political campaigns ignore where money comes from,” Schweizer says. “Cash is cash as far as they’re concerned.”
The hosts close the show on a key question: Is foreign money a major problem in American elections?
“At GAI, our researchers spend a lot of time reading foreign language press reports,” Schweizer explains. “What you see when you spend time reading that material is that [foreign governments] are watching the politics in the U.S. very closely… They want one side to win; they want another side not to win.”
“One of the members of the royal family of Qatar put up on her social media accounts how people can donate to Mamdani,” he adds.
“It matters more now than it did before,” Eggers says.
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