Trump Orders Probe Against Democratic Fundraising Platform ActBlue
President Donald Trump targeted the financial backbone of the Democratic Party in a memo Thursday as part of a major escalation in his ongoing authoritarian effort to use the government to hamstring his political opponents, the White House said.
Trump in a presidential memorandum directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate allegations of straw donations and foreign contributions made through ActBlue, an online fundraising platform that coordinates and processes millions of donations each year for Democrats running for office at all levels of government.
The target of the order aside, the reality of a U.S. president openly issuing orders to the Department of Justice (DOJ) represents a deeply troubling reversal of the department’s longstanding tradition of independence and apolitical law enforcement — though it goes largely unremarked upon in today’s Washington.
Congressional Republicans months ago alleged that the platform didn’t have adequate protections against foreign donations and began investigating it. ActBlue officials have complied with the GOP’s investigations and have denied any wrongdoing.
In his memo, Trump said ActBlue detected at least 22 “significant fraud campaigns” in recent years, around half of which originated abroad. He also noted that in a 30-day period in the 2020 election the platform detected 237 donations from foreign IP addresses using prepaid cards.
The president left out the fact that ActBlue took actions in response to those detections. It caught and rejected fraudulent donations made through the fraud campaigns and banned contributions made from foreign IP addresses using domestic prepaid cards, according to House Republicans.
The GOP has its own online fundraising platform called WinRed, which faces many of the same fraud vulnerabilities as ActBlue, according to Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a professor at Harvard Law School.
Trump in his memo directed Bondi to investigate “other online fundraising platforms” as well, but only ActBlue was mentioned by name.
Since the start of Trump’s second term, ActBlue has seen a major influx in donations. In an email to Democrats earlier this week ActBlue CEO and President Regina Wallace-Jones said the platform helped raise $400 million in the first three months of 2025, according to Punchbowl News.
ActBlue is just one of the many core Democratic institutions that Trump and his fellow Republicans have targeted. Trump has launched a broad assault on lawyers and law firms that represent Democratic campaigns and defend voting rights.
Last week, Trump also threatened to use the Internal Revenue Service as a political weapon against his opponents. The president said his administration was looking into revoking tax exemptions from environmental and anti-corruption advocacy groups “who go after Trump.”
Trump ordered Bondi to report back to him about the result of the investigation within the next 180 days.
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