Dollar bills are pictured with an overlay of the United States Capitol Building. (Douglas Rissing / Getty Images)
By Noah Witherspoon August 26, 2026 at 7:15am
Imagine this: a man knocks on your door, and you make your way through your small apartment to answer it. He introduces himself as an investigator and asks if you’ve donated over $90,000 to ActBlue, a leading nonprofit fundraising platform used by the Democratic Party, in the last seven years.
Your answer is absolutely not.
This exact situation happened to Mark Jennerjohn, an Appleton resident and senior citizen living in Wisconsin.
According to the findings of Kyle Corrigan, lead investigator at Brightline Investigations, ActBlue had inflated Jennerjohn’s donations over a seven-year period. But why?
This process has been dubbed “smurfing” by news outlets who reported on the suspected money laundering scheme. The practice of smurfing is used to inflate small donations with higher values, and investigators at Brightline have raised this unusual accounting standard could be used to mask unethical donations from foreign sources or out-of-state sources. To smurf a $5 donation, ActBlue would mark the donation as $100 and get the remaining $95 from an unknown source to fraudulently attribute it under the lawful donor’s name.
According to Corrigan’s 2023 findings as detailed in The Center Square, he discovered Jennerjohn wasn’t the only victim. Henry Timm was another Wisconsin senior, a playwright living in Sister Bay. Timm’s name is attributed to donations totaling nearly $20,000 in FEC donation records for ActBlue despite stating he had never made a political donation.
When Jennerjohn was presented with his supposed $93,168 sum to ActBlue over a span of 7,878 individual donations, The Center Square reported he told Corrigan, “Look where I’m living.” He plainly stated he couldn’t afford to donate more than $5 at a time, and he was shocked that his donations had been smurfed to tens of thousands of dollars.
When U.S. Representative Bryan Steil, a Republican representing Wisconsin’s 1st District, heard the news that his constituents could be fraudulently attached to a money laundering scheme, he took action immediately. As Chairman of the House Administration Committee, Rep. Steil kickstarted an investigation into ActBlue on October 31, 2023, with an official inquiry.
Rep. Steil uncovered how ActBlue was able to funnel these phantom funds into smaller donations: ActBlue had little to no CVV (Card Verification Value) verification requirements, which could allow someone to pose as another person and donate under their name with no card verification.
On September 6, 2024, the SHIELD Act (H.R. 9488) was proposed in the House to prevent such fraudulent practices from continuing as the midterms approached, when these potentially illegal funds could be deployed to support Democratic candidates.
But Steil didn’t stop there. He sent information uncovered in the House Administration Committee’s investigation to the state Attorneys General offices of Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, Florida, and Missouri.
In a joint effort, the chairs of the House Administration Committee, the House Oversight Committee, and the House Judiciary Committee formally subpoenaed Regina Wallace-Jones, CEO of ActBlue, on July 22, 2025.
During the public hearing on June 10, 2026, Wallace-Jones invoked her Fifth Amendment right 22 times.
Yet regular Americans are left with the same question, not that they’ll get any answers from ActBlue. Where did the money come from? Are foreign sources siphoning cash into our elections, or are out-of-state special interests trying to influence our local politics? Either way, it’s illegal, and Americans across the nation who have been pulled into this orbit of money laundering can only hope for justice.
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Noah Witherspoon is a youth conservative activist. He’s President of the Turning Point chapter of Weston, director of the I Vote Nation chapter of Broward, and a contributor to Pro-Life Journal. Witherspoon’s political experience spans from the age of 11 to today. Even when he was 5, he always felt a deep connection to the office of the president of the United States. That connection grew as he became older, and his work grew as well. Witherspoon worked on two local campaigns, and his writing skills have been shaped from his time as a debate club member starting in middle school.
