FIRST ON FOX: Democrats’ largest campaign fundraising platform says it has strengthened its donor verification standards days after House GOP investigators accused it of potentially taking in foreign donations for U.S. campaigns, according to a new letter obtained by Fox News Digital.
Attorneys for ActBlue sent a letter to the House of Representatives on Monday announcing it is launching a new “passport verification program” as part of its “ongoing investment in the security of contributions processed from donors located abroad.”
House Republicans have for years accused ActBlue of having insufficient verification standards for weeding out illegitimate campaign donations.
The platform has long been used by a myriad of Democrats to raise money for their political campaigns, including Democratic leaders in the House and Senate. ActBlue said it paused donations from Americans abroad in 2025, however.
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ActBlue has consistently denied wrongdoing in responses to Fox News Digital and communications to House investigators. Ten top figures within the company, including executives and founders, have pleaded the Fifth Amendment to avoid answering questions in both public and private sitdowns with GOP-led committees.
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But a new report released earlier this month, first reported by Fox News Digital, appears to show employees green-lighting donations despite some questions about where they came from.
Chief among the GOP’s concerns is ActBlue’s passport number verification. According to the report, the field only required the correct number of characters for a U.S. passport number rather than a valid code for a donation to be accepted.
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But the Monday letter said ActBlue’s new program “adds passport-based identity verification as a further enhancement to ActBlue’s multi-layered approach to fraud and foreign-contribution prevention.”
“In doing so, it also enables U.S. citizens located abroad—who have been unable to contribute on the ActBlue platform since 2025—to resume participating in the political process by supporting the candidates and causes of their choice,” the letter said. “The new program uses the best available technology to allow eligible donors located abroad to verify their identity using a valid U.S. passport. It reflects substantial engineering investments by ActBlue to ensure that, as it resumes processing contributions from foreign addresses, its compliance systems can withstand scrutiny.”
Committee on House Administration Chairman Bryan Steil, R-Wis., said it amounted to a confession.
“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 told Fox News Digital. “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. Chairman Jordan, Chairman Comer, and I will continue to seek answers for the American people.”
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The probe is being co-led by his panel as well as House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky.
A spokesperson for Jordan told Fox News Digital, “This action confirms that the platform’s fraud prevention measures were not as robust as [ActBlue CEO Regina Wallace-Jones] told Congress. We will continue to demand answers.”
The GOP’s earlier report cited a letter by Wallace-Jones to Steil, which maintained that donations on the platform made by people with addresses outside the U.S. required a passport number for verification.
But the Republicans’ report alleged that the verification “only ensures that the entered passport number contains a certain number of characters, not that it is a valid U.S. passport number,” rendering it an essentially meaningless step.
ActBlue told Fox News Digital in response to the report at the time, “There’s nothing to see here. After we released findings of a third-party forensic analysis that completely undermined a central claim that they have made against ActBlue, Republicans are refusing to move on.”
“Instead, they are orchestrating another political stunt before rushing out of town weeks early to go campaign. This coordinated campaign against ActBlue isn’t about the facts, or legislating, it’s about Republicans’ efforts to silence organizations they believe threaten their agenda,” the platform said.
A spokesperson for ActBlue pointed Fox News Digital to a blog post announcing the update when reached for comment.
“In 2025, amid unprecedented attacks from President Trump and his allies, our organization took the proactive step of temporarily suspending all contributions from outside the United States,” the statement said. “ActBlue has now further enhanced its verification process to allow eligible Americans with a U.S. Passport who are located abroad to participate through the platform while maintaining the robust security and compliance standards that donors, campaign, and the public expect.”
It also said ActBlue “accurately described” its vetting process to Congress.
