The New York Times — yes, that New York Times — just published a bombshell report revealing that ActBlue, the Democrats’ massive online fundraising machine, may have lied to Congress about how it screens donations from foreign nationals. And we’re not talking about some right-wing blog making accusations. ActBlue’s own lawyers at Covington & Burling wrote internal memos warning that their CEO’s testimony to Congress was, to put it charitably, not accurate.
So naturally, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, and MSNBC have devoted exactly zero minutes of airtime to covering it. Not a segment. Not a chyron. Not even a disapproving head tilt from Anderson Cooper.
Here’s what went down. Back in November 2023, ActBlue CEO Regina Wallace-Jones sent a letter to the House Administration Committee — that’s Congress, under oath territory — explaining how ActBlue vets donations to make sure foreign money doesn’t sneak into American elections. She told Congress that ActBlue required U.S. passport information “from donors providing an address outside of the United States” before processing contributions. Sounds responsible, right? There’s just one problem: it wasn’t true.
ActBlue’s own law firm, Covington & Burling, reviewed Wallace-Jones’ claims and sent internal memos warning that her statements to Congress painted an “overly optimistic” picture of ActBlue’s screening process. According to the memos, donors who used PayPal or Venmo to contribute didn’t have to verify their passport at all. You could be sitting in a café in Beijing, fire up Venmo, and send money to an American political campaign, and ActBlue’s vaunted screening system wouldn’t catch it.
One memo spelled it out in black and white: “It can be alleged that ActBlue accepted and/or facilitated the acceptance of foreign-national contributions into American elections.”
Read that again. ActBlue’s own lawyers told them they were meddling in American elections. And what did ActBlue do? Did they fix the screening? Did they go back to Congress and correct the record? Did they tighten up the PayPal loophole?
They fired the lawyers.
Covington & Burling — one of the most prestigious law firms in Washington — was separated from ActBlue after sending those memos. A wave of senior ActBlue officials resigned. The whole thing was quietly swept under the rug until the Times got hold of the documents and published them on April 2nd.
Wallace-Jones, for her part, told the Times that her statements were “accurate in the context in which they were written.” Which is the kind of sentence that only a person with a very expensive lawyer would construct. “Accurate in the context in which they were written” is Washington-speak for “technically I didn’t lie if you squint hard enough and ignore the PayPal thing.”
Now, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche has said the ActBlue allegations are a “priority” for the new DOJ. Good. Because if any Republican fundraising platform had been caught telling Congress one thing while their own lawyers were internally screaming that it wasn’t true, we’d already be on day six of wall-to-wall CNN coverage with a countdown clock and a panel of seventeen legal experts.
But ActBlue is the Democrats’ golden goose. It’s processed billions of dollars in donations. Every major Democratic campaign — from Biden to Senate races to your local school board progressive — runs their fundraising through ActBlue. It’s the financial backbone of the entire party. And the possibility that foreign money has been flowing through it unchecked is the kind of story that should make every American furious, regardless of party.
Instead, we get a media blackout. NewsBusters tracked the coverage: after the Times story dropped on April 2nd, not a single liberal broadcast or cable network ran a story on it. Not one. Five days of silence. If you get your news exclusively from network television, you have no idea this happened.
Compare that to the coverage when Republicans were accused — accused, not proven — of having foreign donation issues. Remember when the media spent weeks on allegations about the NRA and Russian money? Remember the breathless coverage, the congressional hearings, the demands for transparency? That was based on far less evidence than what ActBlue’s own lawyers put in writing.
This is a fundraising platform that may have funneled foreign money into American elections, whose CEO may have misled Congress about it, whose own law firm blew the whistle and got fired for it, and whose senior leadership fled the building. And the media’s response is to collectively look at their shoes and change the subject to whatever Trump posted on Truth Social this morning.
We talk a lot about media bias. Usually it’s about spin — how they frame a story, which quotes they choose, what context they leave out. But this isn’t spin. This is a blackout. This is every major liberal network making a conscious editorial decision that the biggest Democratic fundraising scandal in years simply does not exist.
The DOJ is on it. The documents are public. The Times — hardly a right-wing outlet — already did the reporting. All the networks have to do is cover the story that’s sitting right in front of them.
But they won’t. Because protecting the Democratic money machine is more important than informing the American public. And they wonder why nobody trusts them anymore.
