The Democratic Party’s premier fundraising machine faces an uncertain future amid investigations, staff departures, and political headwinds. ActBlue stands accused by Republicans of illegally collecting money for Democrats during the 2024 election by using deceptive methods. But its brushes with controversy go back further than the last cycle, and its next chapter could be consequential for a Democratic Party that is out of power and directionless. Part 1 of this Washington Examiner series examined what accusations ActBlue faces. Part 2 will examine how ActBlue cashes in on sometimes destructive protester politics.
Activists stage a protest. A handful get arrested. They fundraise off the news coverage. ActBlue receives a cut of the proceeds. More protests are staged, more donations flow in, ActBlue continues to cash out, and the cycle repeats.
For years, liberal organizations have used ActBlue to fund protests in which activists engage in legally dubious activities and, at times, are arrested by authorities. For every dollar these organizations raise through ActBlue, the payment processor pockets roughly 4 cents — a seemingly small quantity that quickly adds up, given the platform’s billions of dollars in contributions.
Now, the left-of-center payment processing giant is facing a mysterious exodus of top staffers, and rumors swirl about possible Republican investigations into alleged fraud and other alleged misconduct.
While it is unclear what, if any, legal repercussions could be in store for ActBlue, high-level Republicans have criticized the payment processor for its support of groups engaged in contentious protests. Elon Musk has sung a similar tune, accusing ActBlue of processing payments for the groups behind the recent string of vandalism at Tesla dealerships nationwide.
The five groups named by Musk — Troublemakers, Disruption Project, Rise & Resist, Indivisible Project, and Democratic Socialists of America — indeed use ActBlue to fundraise and have been promoting anti-Musk demonstrations, at which activists have been arrested on charges ranging from disorderly conduct to vandalism.
ActBlue’s link to the left-wing protesters is nothing new, but much of it has gone unreported.
In recent years, the platform has processed money for bail funds that ultimately freed violent criminals, processed donations for racial activist groups participating in riots, and provided the financial infrastructure to keep pro-Palestinian protests, including pro-Hamas demonstrations and campus occupations, running.
In May 2020, riots over the death of George Floyd began to wash over the country. Demonstrators swept through cities with waves of destruction, with one analysis finding that the outbursts cost insurance companies between $1 billion and $2 billion, a figure that doesn’t include costs borne directly by property owners, such as the 60% of the damage that was uninsured in Minneapolis. Authorities arrested well over 14,000 people for offenses such as looting, obstructing roadways, and assault. Nineteen people died as a result of the movement.
Organizations fundraising through ActBlue promoted the nationwide chaos by organizing demonstrations and, in some cases, encouraging violence.
“So proud of all the Minnesotans fighting back against the police tonight,” a May 28, 2020, tweet from the Twin Cities DSA reads. “Minneapolis St. Paul claiming our cities from the oppressors who would rather watch the city burn than see George Floyd’s murderers brought to justice.”
ActBlue maintains an active donation page for the Twin Cities DSA.
Over 2,000 police officers were injured during the opening weeks of the Floyd riots, according to a Major Cities Chiefs Association report.
This wasn’t an isolated case in the DSA, as the national chapter swiftly endorsed the emerging violent protests and called on its members to take to the streets.
“We stand with and share the rage of all those who are making themselves heard on the streets after years of being suffocated by policing and poverty, after years of being looted by corporations, landlords, and billionaires,” the national DSA said in a May 28, 2020, statement. “We will fight for a world where Black people can breathe freely and challenge ourselves to take greater responsibility for abolition, and the courage to pursue a just and liberated future.”
The DSA listed two partner groups, Black Visions Collective and Centro De Trabajadores Unidos En La Lucha, as “on the ground” participating in the riots and encouraged people to donate to them. Both groups have active ActBlue fundraising pages.
“We’ve protested,” one CTUL organizer said in 2020. “We fought for the police not to get higher pay, but we were ignored, and they are still killing. Now, it is to the point where everybody is so angry — I don’t think half of these stores would have been burned or touched if we weren’t so fed up.”
In addition to participating in the Minneapolis riots, the group distributed food, water, and masks to demonstrators.
Perhaps the most important nonprofit organization of the Floyd movement was the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation. The BLM group, which has an ActBlue donation portal, raised over $90 million in 2020 and was a central hub for protest organization efforts. Additionally, the organization routed tens of millions of dollars to local activist groups that staged racial justice protests.
The fundraising platform cashed in from the chaos by breaking its all-time fundraising record at the height of the protests in June 2020, pulling in $392 million, according to Politico.
ActBlue’s involvement with the Floyd riots extends beyond fundraising for its foot soldiers. It also provided the financial infrastructure for the bail funds that paid to release protesters suspected of criminal wrongdoing after police had arrested them.
A Washington Examiner review of ActBlue’s public fundraising directory shows that the payment processor handles donations for dozens of bail funds, including some that later released people who went on to commit violent crimes.
Dozens of individuals freed by bail funds went on to be arrested under suspicion of assault, kidnapping, murder, and attempted murder, according to a CNN investigation. Of the nine murder cases identified by CNN, eight were bailed out by charities that fundraise through ActBlue. Two were released through The Bail Project, four through the Northwest Community Bail Fund, and two through the Minnesota Freedom Fund, which former Vice President Kamala Harris famously promoted.
In one case, The Bail Project freed 33-year-old Marcus Garvin after he was charged with stabbing a gas station customer in the back because he was taking too long in the bathroom. Six months later, authorities charged Garvin with murder after he confessed to police that he murdered his girlfriend by stabbing her in the neck and attempting to sever her leg to dispose of the body, which he later did by dumping it in the woods.
The same CNN investigation found that at least 65 defendants bailed out by the Minnesota Freedom Fund around the time of the Floyd riots were later convicted on felony charges involving violence, physical threats, or sex crimes. More recently, a man bailed out by the ActBlue-funded Texas Organizing Project after police charged him with assaulting his parents allegedly went on a statewide shooting spree in Texas, killing six and injuring three.
When mass nationwide protests returned to the United States after Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attacks in Israel, ActBlue was standing by to provide support to pro-Palestinian demonstrators, including groups engaging in legally dubious tactics.
In November 2023, the Arab Resource and Organizing Center collaborated with Samidoun Seattle, a U.S. arm of an Israeli-designated terrorist organization, to blockade a port on Puget Sound, purportedly to stop aid shipments from reaching Israel. Protesters occupied public roads to block land access to the port and used small boats to obscure sea access. The Arab Resource and Organizing Center fundraises through ActBlue.
Jewish Voice for Peace, which also raises money through ActBlue, later partnered with the same Samidoun branch to block the I-5 highway in Seattle, which is illegal in Washington state.
Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow, and the DSA were three of the primary groups behind the campus protests that saw police arrest over 2,000 people on a variety of charges following clashes with police, building occupations, and protracted periods of illegal camping on university quadrangles. All three of the groups fundraise through ActBlue.
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“More than $16 billion has passed through ActBlue in the past 20 years,” conservative commentator Charlie Kirk wrote in a March 6 X post reacting to the news of the leadership exodus at the payment processor. “What could they possibly be hiding?”
ActBlue did not respond to a request for comment.