ActBlue launched a new passport verification program days after House GOP investigators accused the platform of potentially accepting foreign donations.
Page A2From§Eachthe breakfast edition — 6 October 2026
ActBlue starts checking donor passports, five weeks after a board member took the Fifth on foreign cash
As it ran on the front
All together now — September 1. A House committee is asking ActBlue's board about allegations of foreign money moving through the platform. Board member Kimberly Peeler-Allen is asked questions under that inquiry and invokes her Fifth Amendment right rather than answer them. The record states only that: an invocation, on the record, in a probe about alleged foreign donations. I am not going to tell you what question she was dodging. The filing doesn't say, and I only report what's in the filing.
Twenty days later, the story gets worse for ActBlue in a different building. A probe that started with a board member's silence now has the company's own files saying the quiet part in writing.…
…(cont) Four days after that, a second government office picks up the thread. Missouri's attorney general opens her own investigation and sends ActBlue civil investigative demands — official paper asking for the donation-processing and fraud-prevention records themselves. Not a question to a witness this time. A subpoena to a filing cabinet.
All together now — line one of the new policy, October 6, eleven days after the attorney general's letter went out: ActBlue announces passport verification for donors. A document requiring a passport, where none was required before, for donations where nobody had previously needed a passport.
I'm not accusing the company of anything. I'm reading you its own press release, in order, against its own calendar. Nobody at ActBlue has said the words "we were worried where the money was coming from." They didn't need to. A board member invoked a constitutional right instead of answering a congressional committee. A House investigation said the company's internal memos show foreign-flagged donations got approved anyway. A state attorney general demanded the records. And then, days after the memos became public, the company started asking donors for their passports.
The compliance program speaks. Everyone else, so far, has taken the Fifth.
“Here's how you know the question was real — they don't fix a thing that was never broken, and they sure don't fix it the week after Congress starts asking about it. A board member clams up under oath, the company gets a subpoena from Missouri, and four days later the platform suddenly wants your passport to send ten bucks to a candidate. That's not compliance. That's a company answering with a form because a person wouldn't answer with a sentence.”
“Look, passport verification is just good practice, forward-looking, industry-leading — timing is a coincidence, these things take months to build, you can't just — okay, five weeks, that is a little fast. And the Fifth Amendment thing, that's not an admission, that's a constitutional right, everybody has that right, it's in the — why does it sound like I'm defending the right to not answer the question. I'm not saying she did anything. I'm saying nobody said she didn't.”
The receipts
· Another ActBlue leader pleads Fifth as House investigates alleged foreign donations from the morgue, 1 Sep 2026
· Missouri attorney general investigates ActBlue over campaign fundraising fraud from the morgue, 25 Sep 2026
· House GOP not done with ActBlue after bombshell internal memos raise foreign cash questions from the morgue, 21 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.