by Jeff Childers
In another encouraging election integrity development, yesterday Texas’ terrific Attorney General Ken Paxton announced completing the first part of its investigation into Democrat fundraising platform ‘ActBlue.’ The press release was headlined, “Investigation Into ActBlue Uncovers Large Number of Suspicious Donations Through Obscured Identities and Untraceable Means; OAG Demands FEC Action.”
You may recall this summer’s news about James O’Keefe and his OMG citizen journalists who broke the ActBlue “smurfing” story. Apparently, ActBlue has been —knowingly or negligently— serving as a sort of money-laundering clearinghouse. Large donations, which could easily be foreign, were (are still?) being divided up into hundreds or thousands of small individual donations, made in random low-income people’s names.
The absurd results included cases like a 92-year-old woman living in an Alabama trailer who was apparently making dozens of daily donations, totaling nearly ten thousand dollars per day, to dozens of Democrat candidates and causes. When O’Keefe visited folks who were willing to talk, the donors denied making all those donations, logically insisting they couldn’t afford to do it even if they had that kind of time.
ActBlue responded in August by adding a requirement for the CVC code for credit card donations. Think about that. They weren’t even requiring a security code before then. When was the last time you used your credit card without that code?
The fact is, someone has obviously made vast amounts of illegal donations. There are for sure one or more rotten actors out there. If caught, they’d probably get life in prison, or worse. But Grandma Garland has never even held one of his DOJ press conferences or rambled about saving democracy by finding and convicting these fraudulent election interferers. Oddly.
AG Paxton announced that his office opened the investigation back in December of last year. Yesterday, he sent a formal demand to the FEC —including proposed new rules— to cut off ActBlue (or anyone else’s) ability to illegally launder money this way.
Bless James O’Keefe, for blowing up this story about the little blue smurfers.
