Skip to main content

House committee chairs threaten to subpoena ActBlue officials

By Dan McCaleb
The Center Square

Top officials with Democrat fund-raising platform ActBlue face being subpoenaed if they don't voluntarily agree to interviews with House committees investigating allegations it accepted fraudulent and foreign donations during last year's presidential campaign.

According to a letter sent to an attorney representing current and former ActBlue officials by U.S. House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, House Oversight Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., and House Administration Chairman Bryan Steil, R-Wis., several witnesses initially agreed to interviews but later backed out after President Donald Trump ordered the Justice Department to also investigate.

The letter was obtained by Just the News, which broke the story.

"As we have explained, the Committees are examining allegations that ActBlue, a leading political fundraising organization, allowed bad actors, including foreign actors, to exploit the company’s online platform to make fraudulent political donations,” the chairmen wrote. "Fraudulent political donations corrupt American elections and could amount to interstate criminal conduct."

The U.S. Treasury last year found hundreds of donations made to Democrats via ActBlue that were flagged by banks as potentially suspicious.

“Democrat donor platform ActBlue may have ILLEGALLY funneled donations from China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela and other countries in the names of Americans – without their consent,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., wrote on X after the revelation.

As The Center Square previously reported, Republican strategist Mark Block filed a lawsuit saying 35 donations were made to Kamala Harris’ campaign via ActBlue using his name.

“The relevant precedent is clear that the mere existence of state or federal law enforcement investigations has no bearing on Congress’s oversight power,” the committee chairs wrote. “As such, an Executive Branch investigation into matters related to oversight by the Committees is not a legitimate basis on which you may decline our request.”

The witnesses were given until May 29 to schedule their interviews or face subpoenas.

“The Committees are prepared to resort to compulsory process, if necessary, to obtain compliance with our requests,” the chairmen wrote.

Add new comment

This is not for publication.
This is not for publication.

Plain text

  • No HTML tags allowed.
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
  • Web page addresses and email addresses turn into links automatically.
Article comments are not posted immediately to the Web site. Each submission must be approved by the Web site editor, who may edit content for appropriateness. There may be a delay of 24-48 hours for any submission while the web site editor reviews and approves it. Note: All information on this form is required. Your telephone number and email address is for our use only, and will not be attached to your comment.
CAPTCHA This question is for testing whether or not you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions. Image CAPTCHA
Enter the characters shown in the image.