ActBlue is launching passport verification for overseas donors after House GOP pressure over foreign money claims, a step Republicans say confirms years of weak checks.
Attorneys for the Democratic fundraising giant sent a letter to the House on Monday announcing a new "passport verification program" for contributions from donors located abroad. Fox News Digital obtained the letter as House Republicans pressed ActBlue over alleged foreign and illegitimate donations.
Committee leaders cast the change as proof the platform failed to verify citizenship for years. ActBlue denied wrongdoing and said the upgrade is part of an ongoing security investment after it paused overseas contributions in 2025.
The fight sits at the center of a multi-committee probe into whether billions routed through Democrats’ main small-dollar machine were properly screened. House Administration Chairman Bryan Steil, Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, and Oversight Chairman James Comer are leading the effort.
Steil told reporters the timing speaks for itself. The Wisconsin Republican said ActBlue’s sudden passport program validates what investigators have argued for years.
Steil said:
"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."
He did not stop there. Steil said the rule should have existed from the start, and that major questions still hang over the money already processed.
Steil also said:
"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."
Breitbart reported Comer’s sharper line on the same controversy. The Kentucky Republican tied ActBlue to a broader fraud pattern and said the inquiry is not finished.
Comer said Democrats have “proven themselves to be the party of fraud,” whether the issue is stolen taxpayer dollars or “accepting illegal foreign donations through ActBlue,” and added that “our investigation into ActBlue is far from over.” Breitbart also noted the platform has raised more than $19 billion for Democrats.
A spokesperson for Jordan told Fox News Digital the new controls clash with what ActBlue’s chief executive told lawmakers about fraud prevention.
The spokesperson said:
"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."
That dispute tracks a House Administration Committee hearing on June 10, 2026, titled “Preventing Fraudulent Donations: Transparency, Verification, and Accountability.” Wallace-Jones invoked the Fifth Amendment during questioning in Washington.
Ten top figures inside the company, including executives and founders, have also pleaded the Fifth in sit-downs with GOP-led committees. Republicans treat that silence as more reason to keep digging.
Earlier this month, House investigators released a report first detailed by Fox News Digital. It described employees green-lighting donations despite questions about origin. It also alleged the old passport field checked only that an entry had the right number of characters, not that it was a valid U.S. passport number.
The same report cited a letter from Wallace-Jones to Steil claiming donations from addresses outside the United States required a passport number. Republicans say the character-count standard made that promise thin.
ActBlue’s Monday letter described the new system in glowing terms. Attorneys wrote that it “adds passport-based identity verification as a further enhancement to ActBlue’s multi-layered approach to fraud and foreign-contribution prevention.”
They said the program uses “the best available technology” so eligible donors abroad can verify identity with a valid U.S. passport, and that it reflects “substantial engineering investments” so compliance systems “can withstand scrutiny” as the platform resumes processing contributions from foreign addresses.
The letter also said the change “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 Washington Free Beacon reported that ActBlue’s own outside counsel at Covington & Burling warned leadership in 2025 that the group may have misled Congress about foreign-donation vetting.
The Free Beacon account said memos found passport checks were not applied to Apple Pay and Venmo donations, and that staff knew controls were inadequate. Attorneys flagged “substantial risk” that ActBlue facilitated foreign-national money in U.S. elections.
One memo passage said it can be alleged ActBlue “accepted and/or facilitated the acceptance of foreign-national contributions into American elections.” Another warned that because staff knew the system “was not as robust as necessary,” violations could be painted as “knowing and willful”, language that raises Federal Election Commission and Justice Department exposure.
That reporting also placed the warnings against Wallace-Jones’s 2023 congressional claim that ActBlue used multilayered checks, including U.S. passport numbers, for overseas gifts. The gap between sworn assurances and internal alarms is now fuel for the House probe.
ActBlue rejected the Republican case. In a response to the earlier report, the group told Fox News Digital there was “nothing to see here,” claimed a third-party forensic analysis undercut a central GOP claim, and accused Republicans of a “political stunt” before leaving town to campaign.
ActBlue said the coordinated pressure is about silencing groups that “threaten their agenda,” not about facts or legislation. It also said it “accurately described” its vetting process to Congress.
In a blog post announcing the update, ActBlue said that in 2025, “amid unprecedented attacks from President Trump and his allies,” it “took the proactive step of temporarily suspending all contributions from outside the United States.” It now says enhanced verification will let eligible Americans with a U.S. passport donate from abroad while keeping security standards donors and campaigns expect.
House Republicans read the sequence differently. They note years of warnings, a Fifth Amendment wall from top brass, a report on weak passport fields, outside counsel’s risk memos, and only then a public passport program sold as a tech upgrade. Steil’s line remains the simplest: if the new rule is necessary now, it was necessary on day one.
Campaign cash is speech with rules. When a party’s main fundraising pipe needs a sudden passport gate after committee heat, taxpayers and voters are right to ask how much unvetted money already moved, and who benefits when the answers stay locked behind the Fifth.
