By Geoff Sakala | Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice
In the first 48 hours following Kamala Harris’ launch of her Presidential campaign, she reportedly raised more than $100 million dollars, a record for any Presidential campaign in history.
This enormous online fundraising haul raised eyebrows in some conservative circles for its speed and scale for a vice president, previously with very low approval ratings.
And after that first burst of donations, the Harris campaign reported raising a total of $310 million in July, compared to only $138 million for former President Trump.
Shortly after reporting large fundraising figures in the first days and weeks of the Harris campaign, reports began surfacing on X, a social media news platform, that specific donors were found to have donated thousands of times totaling tens of thousands of dollars without their knowledge.
James O’Keefe of O’Keefe Media Group reported some suspicious donation patterns after examining official Federal Election Commission (FEC) records, reported to the FEC by ActBlue and others.
The FEC records showed a pattern of many hundreds or thousands of small-dollar donations over months and years from donors who were unaware of the volume of these transactions. The FEC calls these straw donors, others call this practice smurfing, and it is illegal under federal campaign donation laws to make donations on behalf of other individuals or to give money to individuals to donate on your behalf.
One such suspected donor named Barbara Staples of Spring, Texas, when asked about the suspicious transactions stated, “No, there’s no way I had made all those”. ActBlue listed her as making 1,600 donations totaling $13,000, including 53 donation transactions in a single day.
Subsequent to these irregularities being reported on social media four State Attorney General’s from Texas, Virginia, Wyoming and Missouri have opened formal investigations into the fundraising and donation practices of Democratic platform ActBlue.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in a press release said, “it is most important that we enforce the law and protect the integrity of our elections. Certain features of campaign finance law may incentivize bad actors to use platforms like ActBlue to covertly move money to political campaigns to evade legal requirements. While campaign finance is protected by the 1st Amendment, suspicious activity on fundraising platforms must be fully investigated to determine if any laws have been broken.”
On Monday, Aug. 5, the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on House Administration sent a letter to the FEC chairman and vice-chair. In the letter, Committee Chairman Bryan Steil of Wisconsin formally requested that “the Federal Election Commission (“FEC”) immediately initiate an emergency rulemaking to require political campaigns to verify the card verification value (“CVV”) of donors who contribute online using a credit or debit card, and to prohibit political campaigns from accepting online contributions from a gift card or other prepaid credit cards.”
The chairman went on further to say, “ActBlue’s practices invite the possibility of foreign donations, and allowing political committees to accept donations from gift cards or other prepaid credit cards promote the appearance and the very real possibility that straw donors are making campaign donations with funds provided by another person or an unlawful donor including a foreign national.”
ActBlue told Newsweek in response to these probes, “This investigation is nothing more than a partisan political attack and scare tactic to undermine the power of Democratic and progressive small-dollar donors. We welcome the opportunity to respond to these frivolous claims.”