Kimberly Peeler-Allen, a board member of ActBlue — the Democrats' $20 billion online fundraising machine — sat down before a congressional committee last week and invoked the Fifth Amendment. She is not the first ActBlue official to do so. She's not even the second.
She's just the latest.
ActBlue co-founder Matt DeBergalis has pleaded the Fifth. CEO Regina Wallace-Jones has pleaded the Fifth. And now a board member has joined the chorus. The House Administration Committee, the House Oversight Committee, and the House Judiciary Committee have all been digging into ActBlue's fraud prevention practices — or, more accurately, the apparent lack thereof — and every time they put an ActBlue leader under oath, that leader suddenly discovers the Constitution.
House Administration Committee Chairman Bryan Steil, Republican of Wisconsin, put it plainly: "We've had individuals come, in public testimony, and plead the Fifth. They have a right to do that. And I understand why they did that. But I think the American people deserve to know exactly what's going on."
What's going on, according to congressional investigators, is that ActBlue's own staff "are aware that both foreign and domestic fraudulent actors are exploiting the platform." That's not a Republican accusation. That's reportedly what the people inside ActBlue already know. Foreign money flowing into American elections through a system that processes donations for virtually every major Democratic campaign in the country.
Steil framed the scale: "We have an entity here with ActBlue, that has raised roughly $20 billion since its creation and moved that into Democratic campaigns and Democratic causes. We want to make sure that they have the fraud preventions."
Twenty billion dollars. That's not a PAC running Facebook ads. That's the financial circulatory system of the entire Democratic Party. And the people who run it won't answer basic questions about whether foreign actors are pumping money through it.
The Fifth Amendment exists for good reason. But we're not talking about some guy who got pulled over with an expired registration. We're talking about the executives of a platform that processes billions in political donations refusing to tell Congress whether they've taken steps to stop foreign money from influencing American elections. The Fifth protects individuals from self-incrimination. It does not protect institutions from scrutiny. And when every single person at the top of the same organization takes the same amendment, the pattern stops looking like individual caution and starts looking like coordinated silence.
