A joint congressional report says ActBlue’s information technology director deleted an internal message five seconds after a staff lawyer warned her to stop removing his requests and accused her of violating company laws and policies.
The report, released Wednesday by the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee, Committee on House Administration and House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, includes screenshots of internal Slack records and donation-review logs.
Committee staff allege the records show possible whistleblower retaliation and a pattern of approving contributions despite foreign indicators.
The report does not identify a total value of confirmed illegal foreign contributions or show that any named Texas candidate received unlawful money. Its findings come from an ongoing congressional investigation, not a criminal judgment.
ActBlue disputes the investigation’s central claims and says its own review supports its donor-screening practices.
Messages disappeared in real time
On February 26, 2025, ActBlue legal counsel Zain Ahmad posted in an IT support Slack group after the company revoked his access to email, Confluence and other internal systems, according to the report. He asked employees to restore access and cited ActBlue’s leave policy.
The report identified Hanna Bonin, ActBlue’s director of IT, as the person who deleted Ahmad’s first request five minutes later. Ahmad then posted additional requests, invoked the company’s anti-retaliation and whistleblower policies, and attached three policy documents. Logs reproduced in the report show Bonin deleted six messages in all.
At 11:05:53 p.m., Ahmad wrote, “Please stop deleting my requests. You are violating the laws and policies of our company.”
The log says Bonin deleted the message at 11:05:58 p.m.
Committee staff described Ahmad as a whistleblower and said he had alerted ActBlue’s board and executive leadership to alleged campaign finance violations and false statements to Congress. Another employee later told ActBlue’s human resources chief that the sequence “look[ed] like blatant retaliation,” according to the report.
Foreign flags and a character count passport check
The same report says ActBlue’s passport check did not authenticate submitted numbers against a government database. Internal procedures said the system performed only “very basic validation” by checking whether an entry contained the correct number of characters.
The report also says employees could use an alternative method to determine citizenship, obtain a review from ActBlue’s legal department and enter the placeholder “ACTBLUEXX” in the passport field. That placeholder allowed later contributions without another passport entry.
Review logs covering transactions flagged for potential fraud from October 9, 2022, through October 31, 2024, recorded supervisors telling analysts to “give the donor the benefit of the doubt,” the report says.
Committee staff highlighted approvals involving foreign IP addresses, a foreign credit card, mismatched billing information and social media profiles used to support a donor’s identity.
One donor’s information pointed to Canada while the donor used a Missouri billing address. A supervisor recommended accepting the contribution because the donor appeared to have an active Twitter account.
Another supervisor approved a foreign-flagged donation after citing the donor’s LinkedIn profile, according to the report.
Those indicators do not establish that the donors were foreign nationals. The committees argue that the warning signs should have triggered more rigorous verification.
The report cited ActBlue documents stating that the platform automatically accepted 99.8% of transactions and rejected significantly less than 0.1% for suspected fraud.
ActBlue says data supports its system
ActBlue published a response the same day, arguing that Republicans were trying to undermine the fundraising infrastructure used by Democratic campaigns. “The results completely debunk the claims made against us,” the organization said.
In an accompanying white paper, ActBlue said 99.87% of nearly $990 million in 2023 political contribution dollars came from donors with domestic addresses. It said 99.99% came from donors who provided either a U.S. address or a passport number.
ActBlue also emphasized that eligible Americans living or traveling abroad, including service members, students and diplomats, may legally contribute. The organization’s review focused on whether it collected a U.S. address or passport number.
The House report focused on whether passport numbers were authenticated and how staff handled flagged transactions.
The September 16 response and white paper do not address the Slack deletions described in the new report.
Texas scrutiny predates the new report
The congressional findings add internal records to a dispute already underway in Texas. As previously reported by The Dallas Express, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) sued ActBlue on April 20, 2026, alleging that the platform misled Americans about its donation screening and allowed fraudulent and foreign contributions. The congressional report is separate from Paxton’s complaint.
The Federal Election Commission states that federal law bars foreign nationals from contributing to federal, state or local elections and prohibits knowingly accepting or providing substantial assistance for those contributions.
The agency says the knowledge standard includes awareness of facts that would lead a reasonable person to inquire about the source of funds, followed by a failure to conduct a reasonable inquiry.
The three House committees said they will continue investigating ActBlue and use their findings to consider potential changes to federal election law.
Provided by Dallas Express
