When President Donald Trump directed the DOJ to investigate the Democrat cash machine ActBlue, The New York Times was quick to paint it as partisan — claiming it “steps up Republicans’ effort to cripple their opponents’ political infrastructure.” But Trump’s direction is based on evidence that suggests the platform could be breaking federal law.
Trump directed Attorney General Pam Bondi on April 24 to “investigate and take appropriate action” regarding allegations of “‘straw’ or ‘dummy’ contributions and … foreign contributions” to American elections through ActBlue and similar services. As The Federalist previously reported, concerns about loopholes and potentially illegal activity have led to multiple probes into the platform.
The Times interviewed Scott Walter, president of Capital Research Center, as one of the few voices defending Trump’s call for investigation in the recent article. He “suggested that the memorandum was about compliance with election law, and was not an effort to undermine Democrats’ electoral prospects,” according to the outlet, though it buried his statement near the end of the story and quickly dismissed his points.
Walter also told The Federalist he was “disappointed the New York Times, in … recent stories on ActBlue and other left-wing infrastructure groups, has failed to include crucial facts about ActBlue its own reporting put on the record.”
Covering For Democrats
ActBlue is a massive fundraising platform for Democrats that has fallen under legal scrutiny in recent years. When then-President Joe Biden was booted from the party’s 2024 ticket, his replacement, Kamala Harris, raised a staggering $310 million in less than one month, as The Federalist previously reported. The Harris campaign’s haul drew attention to “potentially illegal” activity on the ActBlue platform, and Republicans launched various investigative efforts.
The NYT article fear-mongered about concern “across the Democratic Party” that “any entity that has used ActBlue could soon find itself enmeshed in an investigation from a hostile Justice Department.”
In a March 5 report, the Times documented the “internal chaos” plaguing ActBlue, “with at least seven senior officials resigning [in February] and a remaining lawyer suggesting he faced internal retaliation.” The piece claimed to break reporting on a letter sent by ActBlue unions, in part calling on the organization’s board to “hire an outside counsel to take ‘investigatory actions to better understand the current state of the organization’” and “evaluate” its CEO amid the turmoil. The unions also “expressed particular worry about the departures of staff members who are experts on legal and compliance issues,” according to the March 5 report.
The Times briefly acknowledged the unions’ expressed concerns about the state of the organization in its Thursday piece on Trump’s direction to the DOJ, but failed to explicitly mention the letter’s call for investigation. Walter said this detail was also omitted from a March 19 Times report that paints the Trump administration’s apparent efforts to investigate ActBlue and other leftist “institutions” as politically motivated.
“[T]he paper’s two recent stories were so keen to defend the group amid investigations by Congress and the administration that they failed to include prior reporting that ActBlue’s own unions have called for an outside investigation,” Walter said.
In its Thursday coverage of Trump’s call for investigation into ActBlue, the Times also brushed aside concerns that the platform “allows straw and foreign donations,” which are illegal under federal law, claiming such concerns are “thus far unsubstantiated.” The piece also highlights an ActBlue spokeswoman’s comment characterizing the organization as “vital” and “strictly” law-abiding.
But, according to an early April interim report from the House Committees on Administration, Judiciary, and Oversight and Government Reform, ActBlue internal documents reveal the organization itself has “in recent years … detected at least 22 significant fraud campaigns” — nine of which had foreign ties.
“ActBlue’s internal documents and communications paint a damning picture: despite repeated instances of fraudulent donations to Democrat campaigns and causes from domestic and foreign sources, ActBlue is not demonstrating a serious effort to deter fraud on its platform,” the report reads.
According to the report, ActBlue’s conduct could potentially fall in violation of the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971. These findings helped form the basis for the recent federal investigation.
According to the House interim findings, ActBlue stopped accepting “all donations made using gift cards” in September, but, despite such policy changes, “major gaps in ActBlue’s fraud-prevention practices remain.”
In October, CRC Investigative Researcher Parker Thayer said he donated through the platform with a gift card, suggesting a potential security gap.
Notably, ActBlue only began requiring the safeguard of a card verification value, or CVV, with donations last year following heightened scrutiny, as Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton indicated.
The House committees’ report was released less than a month after a group of Republican congressmen sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent expressing concern about “fraud and evasion of campaign finance law by individuals exploiting online contribution platforms, especially ActBlue.” The lawmakers requested access to certain reports “containing the term ‘ActBlue’” related “to money laundering, counterfeit credit/debit card, credit card or debit card fraud, false statements, wire transfer fraud, or identity theft.” The April interim report cited other recent probe letters lawmakers sent to ActBlue amid the House committees’ larger effort to investigate the platform.
Walter suggested the Times’ recent reporting on ActBlue reveals misplaced priorities.
“It and other outlets of left-wing opinion … used to care about campaign finance violations, especially if foreign money may be involved,” he told The Federalist, “but apparently the big questions about ActBlue’s compliance mustn’t be investigated by the normal authorities.”
Logan Washburn is a staff writer covering election integrity. He is a spring 2025 fellow of The College Fix. He graduated from Hillsdale College, served as Christopher Rufo’s editorial assistant, and has bylines in The Wall Street Journal, The Tennessean, and The Daily Caller. Logan is from Central Oregon but now lives in rural Michigan.
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