President Donald Trump listens as Elon Musk speaks in the Oval Office at the White House in February.Alex Brandon/AP
President Donald Trump last week told the Justice Department to investigate Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue and claimed in a fact sheet that the order was aimed at “foreign contributions in American elections.”
Republicans quickly touted the order as cracking down on hidden sources of funds in US elections. “The Democrats’ Dark Money scam has gone on long enough,” Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley said last week.
ActBlue called Trump’s order part of his “brazen attack on democracy in America,” adding that it is “blatantly unlawful and needs to be seen for what it is: Donald Trump’s latest front in his campaign to stamp out all political, electoral, and ideological opposition.”
Trump’s claim that he can order the Justice Department to investigate a fundraising platform used by his political foes based on vague allegations is part of his ongoing effort to use the government’s powers to target political enemies. It’s not a particularly realistic accusation—the fact sheet claims it’s targeting “straw donor” schemes, in which one person donates on behalf of another. Given the fairly strict limitations on campaign contributions, any straw donor scheme that wants to inject any noticeable amount of money into an electoral system that had $15.5 billion run through it is a great deal of tedious, high-risk work for a scammer.
On the other hand, in the post-Citizens United era, there are plenty of ways to inject unaccounted-for money—even, theoretically, foreign money—into the election. Super-PACs can accept unlimited donations from fairly easy-to-obscure sources, for instance, which makes the idea of anyone using a small-dollar conduit like ActBlue (or the GOP equivalent WinRed) fairly silly.
And notably, the funding for some of Trump’s “data” on an alleged ActBlue “fraud” seems to have come from just such a source: a super-PAC bankrolled by Elon Musk.
Last year, an opaque group called the Fair Election Fund began promising to pay “whistleblowers” who cited election fraud “with payment from our $5 million fund.” That never panned out, but the same organization found more success with a claim that 60,000 people who were named as small-dollar donors in the Biden-Harris campaign’s July Federal Election Commission report did not recall making the contribution when contacted by the Fair Election Fund.
As Mother Jones reported last year, the Fair Election Fund appears to have generated this finding by blasting out ominous-sounding texts and emails telling ActBlue donors that their donations had been “flagged,” then tallying people who responded—accurately or not—by checking a box saying they did not recall making the contribution.
The Fair Election Fund’s findings have nevertheless become part of an array of GOP efforts to attack ActBlue, which the White House cited, vaguely, on Thursday. “Press reports and investigations by congressional committees have generated extremely troubling evidence that online fundraising platforms have been willing participants in schemes to launder excessive and prohibited contributions to political candidates and committees,” a presidential memo says.
The Fair Election Fund shared its findings, which it said cost $250,000 to produce, with conservative media. And in a subsequent ad questioning Kamala Harris’ fundraising, the group exaggerated them. “The Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue has been accused of stealing our identities to conceal donations from bad actors,” the ad said.
The group’s accusations were later cited by state attorneys general and House Republicans investigating ActBlue. Right-leaning media outlets continue to cite the Fair Election Fund’s findings as the product of a “conservative watchdog group.”
The group’s claims, however, appear to have resulted not from any independent watchdog effort, but as part of a vast dark money effort by Musk aimed at helping elect Trump last year. The New York Times reported in October that the fund was financed by a nonprofit called Building America’s Future, which was bankrolled in part by Musk. The Fair Election Fund went silent after Election Day last year.
In February, the investigative watchdog site Documented and The Guardian reported additional details tying the Fair Election Fund to Musk. The report noted that the fund is housed within a nonprofit now called Interstate Priorities, formerly known as the For Which It Stands Fund, formed in 2023 with a single $8.2 million donation. The group is led by Tori Sachs, a Michigan GOP operative who appears to have set up the group to support Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ presidential run, which Musk initially supported. The groups appear to have been repurposed in 2024 to boost Trump’s campaign.
The Fair Election Fund allegations last year were part of a broader attack by Republicans on ActBlue. The group’s efforts piggybacked on a 2023 campaign by far-right activist James O’Keefe, who accused ActBlue of assigning large numbers of donations to the names and addresses of people who did not remember donating so often.
Various GOP probes into ActBlue, which incorporated the Fair Election Fund findings, have largely failed to turn up evidence of significant donor fraud or foreign donations being channeled through ActBlue. They have instead focused on ActBlue’s past acceptance of some donations without requiring card verification values—the 3- or 4-digit codes on credit cards used to confirm their validity.
That is, they allege the possibility of fraud via the platform, without documenting much actual fraud or any indication that ActBlue is more susceptible to fraud or straw donor schemes than WinRed.
A report from three House committees released earlier this month did point to 22 suspected “fraud campaigns” in recent years involving ActBlue, including nine with a “foreign nexus.” But a close look at the report’s findings reveals these were suspected fraud efforts identified by ActBlue itself. And the donations involved were generally tiny.
For instance, the report touts suspected fraud efforts from “Iraq, Jordan, Myanmar, the Philippines, and Saudi Arabia.” But the ActBlue document that claim is based on indicates it was not an effort at electoral influence, but a scam targeting platform users. And the suspect contributions were “all for $1.”
The alleged fraud cited—if real—also represents an infinitesimally small proportion of the donations that went through ActBlue last election. Even if the fraud were real, the basic mechanics of ActBlue’s operation as a pass-through for small-dollar donations makes the allegation of foreign donors accounting for more than a negligible portion of ActBlue’s fundraising implausible. In the third quarter alone, ActBlue reported to have more than 6.9 million unique donors using its site and channeling $1.5 billion in donations. Republicans have not produced evidence that ActBlue was used for any straw donor scheme at a significant scale, and such a scheme would be extremely challenging to arrange or hide.
Musk, meanwhile, spent hundreds of millions of dollars to back Trump last year, much of it through dark money PACs that shrouded their spending in secrecy. If Trump really wanted to crack down on secretive election influence efforts, he would start not with small-dollar Democratic donors, but with Musk.
