On March 20th, 2025, the House Judiciary, the Committee on House Administration, and the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform requested two employees of the Democrat fundraising powerhouse ActBlue to voluntarily comply with a request for transcribed interviews. According to letters issued by the Committees, the employees “failed to comply” and are now being compelled to testify.
Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, House Admin Chairman Bryan Steil, and House Oversight Chairman James Comer have issued subpoenas to former Vice President of Customer Service Alyssa Twomey and an ActBlue Senior Workflow Specialist for their depositions “regarding allegations that online fundraising platforms, including ActBlue, have accepted fraudulent donations from domestic and foreign sources.”
According to a press release, “While serving as ActBlue’s Vice President of Customer Service, Alyssa Twomey managed ActBlue’s fraud-prevention team. The Committees have found significant evidence that ActBlue had ‘a fundamentally unserious approach to fraud prevention’ during this period.
The release claims that ActBlue “weakened its fraud-prevention standards twice in 2024 despite knowledge of significant attempted fraud on the platform, including from foreign actors.” Training guides from ActBlue encouraged employees to “look for reasons to accept contributions” rather than assess them for potential fraud.
#BREAKING: @Jim_Jordan, @RepBryanSteil, and @RepJamesComer Subpoena Senior ActBlue Employees for Depositions.
Allegations have risen that online fundraising platforms, including ActBlue, have accepted fraudulent donations from domestic and foreign sources. pic.twitter.com/2yYUZu5J9N
— House Judiciary GOP (@JudiciaryGOP) June 25, 2025
On April 21st, counsel for the ActBlue employees, Danny Onorato, agreed to his clients appearing for transcribed interviews. However, three days later on April 24th, President Donald Trump signed a memorandum calling for the crackdown on illegal “straw donor” and foreign contributions to political campaigns through fundraising platforms such as ActBlue.
Onorato at that time advised his clients not to appear until they had “more information” about President Trump’s ordered investigation, asking for the requests for interviews to be withdrawn “until the Department of Justice completes its investigation or clarifies its position with respect to our clients.”
The letter to Twomey states:
Mr. Onorato’s request that the Committees “withdraw [our] requests for transcribed interviews until the Department of Justice completes its investigation or clarifies its position with respect to our clients” amounts to a demand that the Committees forgo testimony that is potentially critical to our legislative oversight. Congress may set the terms of its own oversight, compelling testimony in a time, place, and manner of its own choosing. Federal courts have consistently held that witnesses may not “impose [their] own conditions upon the manner of [congressional] inquiry.” That is because “a witness does not have the legal right to dictate the conditions under which he will or will not testify” or “to prescribe the conditions under which he may be interrogated by Congress.”
…
“The Committees’ investigation has a clear – and important – legislative purpose. Congress has a specific interest in ensuring that bad actors, including foreign actors, cannot make fraudulent or illegal political donations through online fundraising platforms. Our oversight to date indicates that current law may be insufficient to stop these illicit donations. The Committees are considering a wide array of potential legislative reforms to address these concerns.”
The letter acknowledges those reforms could potentially be requiring card verification values (CVV) to be captured for online political donations, restrictions on donations made using gift cards, prepaid cards, or foreign credit cards, and “enhanced reporting requirements for online fundraising conduits” and that they could be enforced with criminal penalties.
The Gateway Pundit has reported extensively on the ActBlue “Smurfing” donations uncovered by Peter Bernegger, Chris Gleason, Draza Smith and their team. In the alleged smurfing operation, taxpayer funds are said to be laundered from overseas and distributed in low-dollar donations to campaigns by utilizing unsuspecting “retired” or “unemployed” senior citizens.
James O’Keefe’s OMG also went door to door after discovering a plethora of “straw donors” to inquire whether or not they knew their identity was being utilized to launder these funds to campaigns. Here is one such example:
ActBlue Exposed: Texas Donors Shocked by Unauthorized Donations, AG’s Office Investigating
“I’m not rich. I don’t give that kind of money,” says Janice Bosco of Horseshoe Bay, TX, after discovering that ActBlue (@actblue) recorded 648 donations totaling around $16,000 in her… pic.twitter.com/xbmGF7XJ7A
— James O’Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) August 12, 2024
In May, Peter Bernegger joined Ashe Epp and myself on Badlands Media’s Why We Vote podcast to discuss new developments in the smurfing investigation:
Read the full article here