Yambo Declares War On ActBlue Fundraising Organization

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El Cheatolini plans to direct the Justice Department today to investigate ActBlue, the fund-raising platform that powers virtually every Democratic candidate and cause. The move steps up Republicans’ effort to cripple their opponents’ political infrastructure. Via the New York Times:

It will be the third time in three weeks that Mr. Trump has directed the government to target a perceived political enemy, a drastic expansion of his use of his powers to try to damage domestic opponents.

Mr. Trump plans to call for an investigation by Attorney General Pam Bondi into ActBlue, which is used across the Democratic Party’s ecosystem to collect donations online. The inquiry is ostensibly meant to look into possible illegal donations made by people in someone else’s name, known as straw donations, as well as hard-dollar contributions from foreign donors.

Mr. Trump’s impending action represents a threat to one of the key financial cogs of the left, potentially hindering Democrats’ ability to compete in elections. It is likely to please elements of his base, for whom ActBlue has become a top target. Congressional Republicans have separately been investigating what they claim are the platform’s insufficient security provisions.

People who live in glass houses, etc:

Federal Election Commission (FEC) records show Clark made thousands of donations including as recently as in June 2024. According to his grandson Colin, who shared the data with Al Jazeera, these were made without his grandfather’s knowledge.

“They [WinRed] would come in and take $20 here and there but then they would run that transaction somewhere between 50 and 200 times,” Clark told Al Jazeera.

WinRed is allegedly overcharging and prompting recurring donations from donors like Clark without their knowledge, a problem that overwhelmingly impacts elderly voters like him.

This is an old problem with WinRed, one of the largest Republican PACs in the US. Set up in 2019, it has been under the lens of attorneys general across four US states since 2021 for overcharging consumers and deceiving them into donating more than they thought by using deceptive marketing practices.