ActBlue’s decision to roll out a passport-based identity verification program is being framed by a top House Republican as an admission that the Democratic fundraising giant wasn’t properly screening donations coming from outside the United States.
Rep. Bryan Steil (R-WI), who chairs the Committee on House Administration, said in a statement to Fox News that the change amounts to confirmation of long-standing GOP concerns. “This decision to implement a NEW passport verification program only confirms what we’ve been saying: ActBlue failed to verify the citizenship of individuals who made donations from abroad. That’s unacceptable,” Steil said, according to Breitbart News.
The Wisconsin Republican argued the safeguard should have existed from the platform’s earliest days. “This new policy should have been in place on day one. Right now, far too many questions remain unanswered, including what percentage of the billions of dollars that have flowed through ActBlue came from illegal foreign sources,” he said. “Chairman Jordan, Chairman Comer, and I will continue to seek answers for the American people.”
What ActBlue’s Lawyers Told the House
ActBlue’s attorneys outlined the updated procedures in a letter sent to the House on Monday, according to Fox News. The platform says the new program “adds passport-based identity verification as a further enhancement to ActBlue’s multi-layered approach to fraud and foreign-contribution prevention,” language the outlet quoted from the letter.
The company describes the change as a tightening of security around contributions made by donors living abroad. Republicans on Capitol Hill have been pushing that issue for months.
Central to the GOP’s complaints is how ActBlue previously handled passport number fields. As Fox News reported, the field only required that a donor enter the correct number of characters for a U.S. passport number — a formatting check rather than a validation that the code belonged to a real, legitimate passport — for a donation to go through. The new verification layer is intended to close that gap.
A June Hearing, and Repeated Fifth Amendment Pleas
The letter lands roughly four months after the House Administration Committee convened a June hearing on preventing fraudulent campaign donations. At that session, ActBlue CEO Regina Wallace-Jones repeatedly invoked her Fifth Amendment rights, declining to answer questions from Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) about foreign donations, the platform’s fraud controls, and the wave of departures from ActBlue’s legal team, per Breitbart News.
The refusal to answer became one of the more memorable moments of the hearing and helped fuel the ongoing scrutiny from Republican lawmakers, who have kept the investigation open rather than treating the hearing as a one-off.
ActBlue’s Defense
Meanwhile, ActBlue has continued to publicly defend itself. In September, the platform described itself as a “safe and secure platform,” pointing at the same time to the more than $19 billion it says it has helped raise for Democratic candidates and causes.
The statement reflects the scale of the operation that Republicans are investigating. With billions of dollars moving through the platform each cycle, even a small share of improper contributions would represent a significant sum — which is precisely the sort of calculation Steil is now demanding.
Comer Vows Investigation Will Go On
Republicans have made clear they don’t view ActBlue’s policy update as a reason to stand down. In September, Breitbart News reported that GOP lawmakers had warned the platform that their probe was continuing.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) drew a direct line between the ActBlue inquiry and a broader charge against Democrats. “Whether it’s allowing fraudsters to steal taxpayer dollars or accepting illegal foreign donations through ActBlue, Democrats have proven themselves to be the party of fraud,” Comer said. “Our investigation into ActBlue is far from over. We expect more documents and testimony in the weeks ahead.”
That promise of additional documents and testimony suggests the next phase of the investigation will involve new rounds of requests to the platform and possibly further appearances by its leadership. It also signals that the dispute is unlikely to be resolved by the Monday letter alone.
Where the Fight Goes Next
The exchange between ActBlue and House Republicans now turns on two competing narratives. The platform frames its updated verification system as a strengthening of protections that were already multi-layered. Steil and his colleagues frame the same announcement as evidence that a critical control was missing until Congress started asking questions.
Notably absent from either side’s public statements is a specific figure for how much money came from donors abroad without proper verification — a number Steil explicitly identified as one of the unanswered questions. Whether the committee’s pursuit of documents and testimony produces that figure will likely determine how much further the investigation extends.
For now, the chairman’s message is that a new passport check is welcome but insufficient, and that the committees led by Steil, Jordan, and Comer intend to keep pressing for a fuller accounting of who sent money through one of the Democratic Party’s most important fundraising pipelines.
Source: www.breitbart.com — https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2026/10/06/rep-bryan-steil-actblues-update-of-donation-standards-confirms-failure-to-verify-donors/