On Wednesday, The Michigan Enjoyer posted an article about one of the donors to the campaign donors to Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Socialist running for Michigan’s U.S. Senate seat.
The article reports:
Milan — Out in the country on a rutted dirt road lined with corn lives an old woman and her dog.
Elizabeth Waffle, 88, was forced to move into a shabby trailer two years ago after her house burned down. She owns an old pickup truck but no computer.
Nevertheless, Waffle, who lives on a modest pension, is a true believer in liberal causes and continues to make small political donations by way of ActBlue—the Democrat online fundraising platform.
But somehow, those few dozen small donations she has made over the past five years have transmogrified into 14,696 donations totaling more than $150,000—the equivalent of eight donations a day, every day for the past five years, averaging $9.18.
“One hundred and fifty thousand?” Waffle said with real surprise. “Hell no. I don’t have that kind of money.”
She says she has contributed to Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Socialist running for Michigan’s U.S. Senate seat, but not 47 times spanning the last two years, as federal filings show.
The article notes:
The subject of multiple investigations, the fundraising platform (Act Blue) is accused of “rinsing” foreign money and massive private donations by using the stolen names and addresses of real, often elderly Americans to fabricate hundreds of small-dollar donations. Names like Elizabeth Waffle.
ActBlue CEO Regina Wallace-Jones recently invoked her Fifth Amendment rights 22 times during a congressional hearing regarding foreign contributions.
According to FEC campaign contributions compiled by Bob Cushman, ActBlue shows Waffle donating from her trailer, even though she has no computer and spotty internet access. It also shows her donating from an apartment she rented in town two years ago after her house burned down. Sometimes it shows Waffle donating from both the trailer and the apartment on the same day. It shows her donating to out-of-state candidates she’s never heard of.
“This is very abnormal,” said Waffle, who sat in the trailer threshold looking over the paperwork I had brought. “I think it’s wrong, and I think there’s something in there that’s off.”
This is the money in politics that needs to be shut down!