Money mules in Peltola campaign too? Alaska’s rep. raked in thousands of small-dollar donations from out-of-state unemployed elderly

By
Suzanne Downing
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27

The congressional campaign of Rep. Mary Peltola in 2022 was truly remarkable in many ways. After being out of the political spotlight for years, Peltola emerged as a dark-horse candidate with an unknown brand among 48 names on a special primary ballot.

However, she quickly became the darling of the mainstream media, the Left, and even a few Republicans who were once fans of Congressman Don Young. While Peltola still enjoys a honeymoon period with the media, she has disappointed many Alaskans with her hard-left positions.

Unfortunately, a closer look at Peltola’s campaign donation list from 2022 reveals that she relied on the ActBlue fundraising platform, which is notorious for its use by many Democrat “fundraising mill” operations.

Peltola received thousands of small donations from a relatively small group of Americans who, according to records, appeared to be donating multiple times a day or week to Peltola over the course of less than a year, almost always in very modest amounts that added up over time.

Must Read Alaska has combed through thousands of Federal Election Commission listings of the donations that Rep. Mary Peltola received from outside Alaska through ActBlue during the 2022 election cycle. The donations came from all over the country, including Florida, California, Missouri, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and elswhere. What’s more, many of the donors were elderly individuals, and most of them were not employed, according to FEC data obtained through ActBlue.

If we take these official records at face value, it appears that many senior citizens are spending their days hitting the “Donate Now” button repeatedly for political causes and candidates. The amounts that each one of these elderly donors are contributing add up to sometimes thousands of dollars a year.

To illustrate, here are a few examples of small-dollar donors (all elderly and from out-of-state) who fall into the “obsessive compulsive” category of frequent donations, where they’ve given to both ActBlue and Peltola, often donating multiple times per day over the course of many months. We are only using their initials and how many discrete donations they made in this 2021-2022 election cycle:

S.K.: 1,551 separate donations
G.C.: 5,008 separate donations
A.A.L.: 1,916 separate donations
J.B.: 1,590 separate donations
R.L.: 3,862 separate donations
P.C.: 1,520 separate donations
B.S.: 2,801 separate donations
P.P.: 9,482 separate donations

A snapshot of just one file of a person who donated multiple small amounts to Rep. Mary Peltola in December, after the election.

The pattern of the donations are similar to the type reported by journalist James O’Keefe and private investigator Kyle Corrigan, who separately spoke to a handful of these Americans who were listed as donors through ActBlue, only to learn that the elderly Americans had no idea they had donated the amounts listed by ActBlue and the Federal Election Commission — because they had not made those donations. Instead, it appears that ActBlue may be identifying elderly donors and then pushing dark money donations through their profiles.

This practice, if it is occurring, is known as “smurfing.” Smurfing, also called “structuring,” is how some launder money from a large transaction that is broken up into smaller transactions in order to avoid detection.

Money mules: O’Keefe shows how ActBlue gets massive political donations from elderly, fixed-income Democrats

Could it be that these elderly contributors are being used as straw donors in a type of smurfing operation?

What O’Keefe and Corrigan found in their door-to-door research were that the donors knew they had made one or two small donations to a Democrat. They were, after all, Democrats. But they were floored to discover that they were credited with donating thousands of dollars.

Here’s an example of a person who has made an extraordinary number of contributions:

H.H. of New Mexico started donating to Mary Peltola on Sept. 15, 2022, and then made donations nearly every other day, including on Sept. 15, 16 (twice), 19, 20, 22, 25, 27, 29, 30 (twice), Oct. 4, 6, 12 (twice), 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 24, and following this pattern all the way to Dec. 31 when he made his final donation of the year.

As with the other obsessive-compulsive donors, he is listed as not employed. And as with so many others, he is elderly.

H.H. also was donating with excessive frequency to other causes through ActBlue. In December, 2022, long after the election was over, he made over 85 separate donations to ActBlue, for causes such as the “Let America Vote PAC,” “Stop Republicans,” “Progressive Turnout Project,” “Democratic Victory PAC,” “End Citizens United,” and other groups that use ActBlue for fundraising.

In November, H.H. made over 310 donations to ActBlue; this means he was making 10 donations a day on average. All of them were between $3 and $29.

But in the two-year election cycle of 2021-2022, H.H. made over 2,600 separate donations through Act Blue, an average of over 3.5 donations per day for two years. All of this donors contributions through ActBlue were small.

P.P., a middle-aged woman from Munster, Indiana, also made over 600 donations through ActBlue in December alone, after the election was over. Her total for 2021-2022 was over 9,200 separate donations. Many of the donations are as small as 30 cents. In the 2020 cycle, she also made what would be considered an unlikely number of donations.

Although there is no proof, only circumstantial evidence, that there is a type of donor-laundering operation going on in fundraising mills that are integrated with the ActBlue program, this is the kind of activity that might raise concerns from the FEC, which has been silent on the matter since O’Keefe raised the red flag last week.

A year ago, ActBlue was the subject of a complaint about alleged credit card fraud by a person who said that the political fundraising tool deducted hundreds of small contributions that the man did not authorize.

“The Complaint and Supplemental Complaint also state that ActBlue charged multiple transactions as ‘reoccurring’ when Complainant intended the contributions to be singular transactions.”

The FEC assigned a “low priority” to the complaint because the dollar amount was too low to rise to the level of concern to the commission.

act-blue-complaint-fecDownload

27 COMMENTS

    • That sign vandalism story in the ADN screams false flag. A potential perp shows up right when a reporter is there in broad daylight?

  5. How this has not been investigated is indicative that the bureaucracy that exists in government has become the boss and all the politicians are the puppets. The goal is for us to be the slaves.

    • It has been. Investigated, vetted, and approved for political malfeasance.

      The GOP, as usual, says nothing and does less about it. Why? Don’t want to upset their own grift.

  7. So this goes beyond simply duping seniors on fixed incomes to support causes likely presented as favorable to seniors – it is even worse! Blatant money laundering that doesn’t even appear to be discreet. Albeit this group is still likely preying on elderly seniors, then using donation data to run the forged donations, knowing that too many older seniors get confused, don’t remember details, have distrust and fear and likely would not pursue that they were used in a forgery scheme. Not all older seniors of course so please do not be offended. My 88 year old mother would be all over it if her name had been used, but alas, she runs around wearing a MAGA hat and would never donate to ActBlu.

  8. Thank you for looking into this, I was planning to do it myself. So much for keeping “dark money” out of Alaska politics. Someone needs to look up Murkowski’s donations. Pretty sure she got plenty of this dark money.

  9. I’ll bet when Sarah Palin figured out that she couldn’t win because Nick Begich III would erase her chances from victory, Palin donated to Peltola through a back-door third party. She did the same thing to her Lt. Governor Sean Parnell in 2014 and supported the disgraced, bald, fat thief, Bill Walker.
    A loser’s revenge act. So glad Palin is finally outed for who she really is.

    • And you know why that is the case, Greg?
      With Princess Lisa, it is not just that she is sucking-up to a fellow radical leftist, it is a matter of “Uteri Uber Alles!”

  12. Nothing will be done about it. The republicans should play the same game since nobody gets called to the carpet for it. it is open season to lie, cheat and steal your way to a political seat.

  15. GC and PP are obviously Mr Lebowski’s urban achievers. Why wouldn’t we now assume that Murkowski got a suitcase full as well?

  16. Unrelenting corruption. I need to stop reading this [stuff] as it is making me physically ill. That said, more to come, for it remains some time before the apocalypse arrives….

  17. Ok–so now what? Do we discover this and just sit to watch nothing happen? Because that is what typically happens. They get caught, then? I would love to see this pattern to change! Let’s change it!

  19. No one looks at the FEC website to see how much money they donated. But most people look at their credit cards and bank statements so something this widespread would surely be noticed by almost everyone. So what is the other half of this transaction, where did the money come from? Surely the money trail leads somewhere even if it is a dead end.

    While no ones look at their donations on the FEC website, I guarantee you that the Peltola campaign looked. Wonder if the sent 9,482 thank you letters to P.P?

  20. If an independent news journalist can find evidence of fraud, imagine what is out there that the agencies paid full time could uncover if they were allowed to. We continue to reach new levels of corruption.

  21. When can we start legal proceedings to recall her and investigate her money laundering any illegal vote purchasing?

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