On Sunday (updated Monday), Just the News posted an article about questionable campaign donations to Democrats funneled through ActBlue.
The article reports:
For the first time, a Wisconsin court has approved a subpoena to the massive Democrat fund-raising platform ActBlue, saying it owes an explanation to a Republican whose email identity was used to make liberal donations he did not authorize.
“Something is not right,” Waukesha County Circuit Court Judge Brad D. Schimel declared as he approved a limited demand for documents and opened a new front into a widening fund-raising probe begun earlier this year by Congress and 19 attorneys general.
Schimel rejected ActBlue’s arguments that it was onerous to require it to comply a subpoena for third-party donations it processed on its platform. The judge permitted GOP consultant Mark Block and his lawyers from America First Policy Institute to conduct discovery to determine if fraud was involved in the use of his identity to make dozens of Democrat donations on his old email address.
The article notes:
ActBlue’s lawyers unsuccessfully tried to quash the subpoena, arguing that a man using the identity Bernard Cain used Block’s email address from California and Colorado and that it is not responsible for his actions.
The judge rejected a broader subpoena sought by Block’s ‘lawyers that would have required ActBlue to disclose how it guards against fraud but approved a revised version offered by the plaintiff that aimed to ascertain how the donations using Block’s email addresses were paid,
“ActBlue is not a party to this action,” attorney Glenn Graham argued on behalf of the fundraising platform. “They are not a defendant. The case law, and I know you read the brief, the first step to get the information from the interested person himself or herself and here that interested person is Bernard Cain. And it sounds like plaintiff is close to getting that information.”
…Block filed a lawsuit this fall after he discovered an old email account he used for the 2012 Herman Cain presidential campaign was receiving receipts for donations to Democrat candidates like Kamala Harris that he did not make.
The use of peoples’ names without their consent by ActBlue has been going on for a while. During the last election season, people in various areas of the country who had supposedly made campaign contributions were interviewed and denied knowledge of the contributions. The ActBlue campaign finance source is simply one more pipeline that needs to be blocked off in order to improve election integrity.