ActBlue calls Miyares’ investigation into fraud claims a ‘partisan political attack and scare tactic’

RICHMOND, Va. (WRIC) – Virginia’s Republican attorney general said his office is “looking into” fraud claims made on social media against ActBlue, a fundraising platform for Democrats that said the accusations are part of “a years-long disinformation and harassment campaign.”

Attorney General Jason Miyares revealed his office was digging into ActBlue on X in response to a post from conservative influencer and activist Charlie Kirk , who repeated claims from other X posts and asked when one of the state attorneys general would “take action.”

In his post, which has been viewed 2.5 million times on X, Kirk reacted to a claim from another post that one Virginia woman renting an apartment for less than $2,000 a month donated to ActBlue 22,619 times from October 2019 until January 2023 totaling nearly $840,000.

Kirk, the CEO and co-founder of the conservative youth organization Turning Point USA, cited the claim about the Virginia woman and claimed that “It’s trivially easy to find massive, repeated donations to ActBlue that use stolen identities and, quite possibly, stolen credit cards.”

“My office is aware of these allegations and rest assured, we are looking into it,” Miyares wrote on X on July 29 .

A review of records by 8News found the person named in the post is a man who has overwhelmingly donated to Republicans and with listed addresses on campaign finance records that include a Henrico home sold last April for $1.1 million, per multiple real estate sites, and a senior living community with 1-bedroom apartments starting at $213,000.

Social media origins of the fraud claims in Virginia

The specific claim originated from a March 7 post on X from the Virginia Project, which describes itself as “a strategic political operations plan to eliminate the Democrat Party and associated threats to the security and well-being of the people, utilizing lawful, peaceful, moral and ethical methods.”

The post, which starts with “Ghost donor problem” and has more than a million views, cites numbers from a database on Election Watch called Smurf Search to claim that one Virginia donor made 22,619 transactions that totaled $839,466.

“This donor probably donated to one thing once, with the rest being identity theft by an unknown actor,” the post reads.

The X post from the Virginia Project does not mention ActBlue nor does Election Watch’s Smurf Search.

The president of Election Watch Inc. is Peter Bernegger, who describes himself as an “independent journalist” and, per ProPublica reporting last year , “has engaged in relentless — and so far futile — legal efforts to prove fraud in the 2020 election.”

ProPublica reported in 2023 that Bernegger filed a suit seeking the removal of a Wisconsin elections commissioner claiming she was “not qualified to fill a position intended for a Republican.”

ProPublica’s reporting described him as someone “who promotes conspiracy theories about election fraud” and said Bernegger has ties to a website touting “a super-fast computing method to identify fraud by matching voter data with property tax records and other large databases,” that solicited donations to his Election Watch Inc. nonprofit.

He was convicted of mail and bank fraud and sentenced to 70 months in prison and ordered to pay $2.2 million, which he later got reduced to about $1.7 million, per ProPublica.

Another user with pro-Republican and anti-Democrat posts on X responded to the Virginia Project’s post on July 23 – more than four months later — claiming that the person was a 79-year-old woman living in the Richmond suburbs renting an apartment for less than $2,000.

The post includes screenshots of a people search finder site with the person’s name and state political donations to Republicans with the matching name.

“She allegedly has 22,619 Dem donations since ‘19, for $839,466 in 592 days. Utter fraud (ID theft) via @actblue. Yet ~$1K likely legit state @VA_GOP donations. AGs like @JasonMiyaresVA,” reads the post.

This X post — which has been viewed 3.2 million times so far — was the one Kirk, a primetime speaker at the Republican National Convention in July, was reacting to. This led to Miyares’ response on July 29, which has nearly 2 million views on X.

“On Thursday, the AG learned about this issue and promptly directed his office to look into the allegation,” Ian Lichacz, a member of Miyares’ staff, wrote in a July 29 email. “We cannot comment further at this time.”

Lichacz did not respond to follow-up questions on specifically how Miyares learned about the claim.

Miyares sends ActBlue a letter ‘demanding answers’

Miyares announced Friday that he sent ActBlue a letter calling on it to give his office “a detailed description of ActBlue’s processes and procedures for verifying the legitimacy and accuracy of donor and contribution information as well as the processes and procedures used in verifying information reported to regulatory bodies.”

In his Aug. 2 letter, Miyares wrote that his office has learned of “multiple serious allegations” that ActBlue has taken part in “fraudulent, deceptive, and/or otherwise illegal activities” in Virginia.

“This includes hundreds of thousands of dollars of contributions through individual donors in the Commonwealth in volumes that are facially implausible and appear suspicious,” he wrote.

Miyares added that some are reportedly making multiple daily donations, some are seniors who are listed as “not employed” or “retired” and donations “list suspicious addresses.”

“Taken together, these circumstances appear to indicate that contributions via ActBlue are being made from fictional donors or dummy accounts, or that information reported by or through ActBlue may be fraudulent,” Miyares wrote, adding that it could also mean donations are made without “donors’ consent or awareness.”

ActBlue policy requires all individuals, committees and organizations to comply with the law and bans the improper use of its technology and name, including not complying with tools for recurring contributions .

In a statement responding to Miyares’ letter, ActBlue said the “Virginia Attorney General lent the credibility of their office to a years-long disinformation and harassment campaign targeting ActBlue based on frivolous and false accusations.”

“This investigation is nothing more than a partisan political attack and scare tactic to undermine the power of Democratic and progressive small-dollar donors,” the fundraising platform’s statement continued. “We welcome the opportunity to respond to these frivolous claims.”

“Republicans simply cannot accept that millions of Democrats are energized and engaged in the political process, and are instead resorting to political attacks and spreading false accusations,” ActBlue added in its statement, including links that it said lay out the “facts about this long-running disinformation campaign.”

Donations via ActBlue have helped Vice President Kamala Harris bring in record fundraising since President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 race.

The Harris campaign reported raising $100 million in less than 36 hours and ActBlue said grassroots supporters raised nearly $47 million by 9 p.m. the day Biden exited the race, calling it “ the biggest fundraising day of the 2024 cycle .”

A former FEC attorney weighs in

Saurav Ghosh, a former Federal Election Commission enforcement attorney and the federal campaign finance reform director for Campaign Legal Center, responded to an X post claiming that a single Michigan donor gave more than 20,000 times since 2019 to ActBlue.

“I’ve seen several posts like this recently, so as someone that has spent a lot of time with @FEC data allow me to present a simple and non-nefarious explanation for how one person can easily make thousands of donations in a few years,” Ghosh wrote in a July 29 X post , which was one of the links ActBlue shared on Friday.

Ghosh noted that when someone gives to a particular campaign or cause through an online fundraising platform like ActBlue or its Republican counterpart WinRed, it’s “recorded as TWO transactions in FEC data reports, one for the contribution from donor to platform, and one for the contribution from platform to candidate.”

The platforms, Ghosh wrote, collect contributions that are spread to multiple candidates, meaning donors give to funds that could be divided among several campaigns.

“A donor can give a small amount to the fund, and FEC records will show a very small amount donated to each candidate,” Ghosh wrote. “So with just a few clicks the donor can make a single monthly donation that looks like they made dozens of separate mini-donations. They almost certainly didn’t.”

Ghosh added that the “same analysis could apply to WinRed aggregate funds backing multiple GOP candidates” and that the FEC “probably needs a better website interface (or an improved reporting system) to make it clearer how this all works.”

“But unless and until they adopt one, this reporting framework will no doubt continue to generate confusion, unfortunately,” his X thread concluded.

What the records show

Federal Election Commission records show the person identified, whose name 8News won’t publicize, has given primarily to Republicans, including to former President Donald Trump.

Federal and state campaign finance records show donations from the individual before April 2023 coming from the same Glen Allen address, a home that was sold in April 2023 for $1.1 million, according to Zillow, Redfin and other real estate websites.

His state donations include contributions to Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s and former House Speaker Kirk Cox’s gubernatorial campaigns, per Virginia filings with an address matching the one in federal records.

Federal records show donations coming from a listed address at a senior living community near Short Pump in Henrico after April 2023.

Someone with the same name who is listed as living in Glen Allen has given to ActBlue and WinRed, but FEC records don’t show the specific listed addresses. They have four FEC donation entries for ActBlue and 11,451 for WinRed.

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