Journalist James O’Keefe, who parted ways with Project Veritas earlier this year and started O’Keefe Media Group, has rolled out his first project: Research shows that the behemoth Democrat fundraising platform known as ActBlue is using senior citizens who clearly don’t have the means to make large political donations, but are somehow mysteriously donating thousands of times a year and in many cases tens of thousands of dollars to Democrat candidates.
ActBlue acts like a fundraising clearinghouse for small-dollar donations. Every year it has to report to the Federal Election Commission where it got each and every dollar. The dollars go through ActBlue, and are funneled to various Democrat candidates or Democrat causes.
Nearly all Democrat candidates use the ActBlue fundraising mechanism, which is tied to the Democratic Party.
“We are a mission-based organization, which is why only Democrats and progressive organizations (not Republicans) can use our tools to fundraise,” the organization says on its website.
What O’Keefe was able to determine by combing the ActBlue donor lists is that some elderly, fixed-income donors are making thousands of donations a year. They tend to be people who can say they have made one or two donations, but no more.
When O’Keefe interviewed them, they had no idea that they were being used by what may be a program that uses their identities as mules for funneling dollars to candidates.
ActBlue has experienced significant growth in recent years. From 2004 to 2007, the platform raised $19 million. In the 2005-2006 campaign cycle, ActBlue raised $17 million for 1,500 Democratic candidates, with $15.5 million going to congressional campaigns. By August 2007, ActBlue had raised $25.5 million.
In the 2018 midterm elections, ActBlue raised $1.6 billion for Democratic candidates, with notable politicians such as Conor Lamb, Beto O’Rourke, and now-former Democrat Kyrsten Sinema benefiting from the platform.
In 2019, ActBlue raised approximately $1 billion, bringing in $420 million between January and mid-July 2019 from 3.3 million unique donors, dispersed to almost 9,000 Democratic campaigns and organizations.
One woman was listed by ActBlue as having given $18,000 to the campaign of Joe Biden for president. She was shocked by the revelation and said that she would certainly have made such a donation, had she had that kind of money, but she did not have that level of disposable income.
In 2020, ActBlue set multiple fundraising records, raising $19 million in the week following the death of George Floyd, and then breaking that record with $20 million raised on June 1.
Over half of the donations in the week following Floyd’s death went to non-political charitable causes, with one ActBlue page devoted to a bail fund for violent protesters that raised over $1.5 million from over 20,000 donors.
ActBlue also broke the single-day fundraising record when over $30 million was donated in the day following the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2020.
In 2022, ActBlue raised $20.6 million on the day the Supreme Court issued its opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
What is surprising is the number of individual donations from people who told O’Keefe that they had only made a couple of small donations.
Kyle Corrigan, a private investigator in Wisconsin, also discovered people in his state had been used as fundraising mules for ActBlue.
