Trump’s attack on ActBlue’s “dark money” was backed by dark money

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 last week called Trump’s order part of his “brazen attack on democracy in America,” adding that the act 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, where one person donates on behalf of another person. Given the fairly strict limitations on campaign contributions—$6,600 in 2024—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 dollar 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 [FEC] report but 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 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.

But the Fair Election’s fund’s findings have nevertheless become part of an array of GOP efforts to attack ActBlue, which the White House’s fact sheet 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,” the fact sheet says. 

The Fair Elections 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. A former spokesperson for the group did not respond to requests for comment.

In a March the Investigative watchdog site Documented reported additional details tying the Fair Election Fund to Musk. The report noted that the Fair Election Fund is housed within a non-profit now called Interstate Priorities, formerly known as 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 Republican operative who appears to have set up the groups to support 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 what appeared to be a broader attack by Republicans on ActBlue. The group’s efforts last year piggybacked on 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  House Judiciary Committee report 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 represent an infinitesimally small proportion of the donations that went through ActBlue last election. Even if 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 their site and channeled $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 Elon Musk.