Economy · ActBlue · May 18, 2026Congress

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The CEO is Testifying. The Legal Team Took the Fifth 146 Times — and ActBlue’s Own Lawyers Wrote the Memo.

The 30-second summary — May 18, 2026

The testimony. ActBlue CEO Regina Wallace-Jones agreed in mid-May to testify publicly before the U.S. House Committee on Administration on June 10, 2026. The committee invited her by formal letter dated April 23. Her personal subpoena had been issued July 22, 2025.

The 146 Fifths. Per the April 2026 joint interim staff report “Fraud on ActBlue, Part II: Illicit Foreign Donations and a Cover-up,” five current or former ActBlue legal-team employees invoked the Fifth Amendment a combined 146 times across five depositions held July–December 2025. The three publicly named: Darrin Hurwitz (former General Counsel, terminated), Aaron Ting (former Associate / Interim General Counsel, abrupt resignation), Zain Ahmad (former Legal Counsel, extended leave).

The committee architecture. Three House committees, Republican-led, running the probe jointly: Administration under Chair Bryan Steil (R-WI), Judiciary under Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH), Oversight under Chair James Comer (R-KY). Senate coordination via Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), HSGAC PSI ranking-then-chair.

The Covington memos. The April 2, 2026 NYT scoop revealed that ActBlue’s own outside counsel, Covington & Burling, had warned the ActBlue board in early 2025 of “substantial risk that some of the funds received were impermissible contributions from foreign nationals.” The memos also flagged that donors paying via Apple Pay, PayPal, or Venmo were not prompted for passport information at all — even though ActBlue had previously told Congress foreign-address donors were always required to supply a U.S. passport number.

DOJ + state involvement. President Trump signed an April 24, 2025 presidential memorandum directing AG Pam Bondi (R) to investigate online fundraising platforms (180-day report). Steil received a classified FBI briefing in September 2025. Texas AG Ken Paxton (R) filed a civil suit April 20, 2026 in Tarrant County under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act.

ActBlue’s position: “has zero tolerance for illegal contributions of any type… foreign contributions constitute less than 1% of the total contributions on the ActBlue platform.” The organization characterizes the probe as politically motivated.

The chief executive of ActBlue — the donor-side payment processor through which essentially every Democratic federal candidate, party committee, and progressive cause organization in the United States raises money — will testify under oath before a U.S. House committee on June 10, 2026. The chief executive’s name is Regina Wallace-Jones, the former Facebook Chief of Staff and one-time mayor of East Palo Alto, who has run ActBlue since January 2023.

Her testimony was scheduled after five members of her legal team invoked the Fifth Amendment 146 times— combined — across depositions held between July and December 2025 by the three House Republican committees running the ActBlue probe: Administration (Chair Steil), Judiciary (Chair Jordan), and Oversight (Chair Comer). The April 2026 joint staff report “Fraud on ActBlue, Part II” documents the count.

The accountability case here is not, on its face, hypothetical. ActBlue’s own outside counsel — Covington & Burling, one of the most established firms in Washington — warned the ActBlue board in early 2025, in memos that became public via a New York Times scoop on April 2, 2026, of a “substantial risk that some of the funds received were impermissible contributions from foreign nationals.” The memos identified specific holes: ActBlue had told Congress in 2023 that donors with foreign mailing addresses had to supply a U.S. passport number; the memo found that rule “was not always followed,” and that donors paying via Apple Pay, PayPal, or Venmo were never asked for passport information at all. By March 2025, the entire ActBlue legal and compliance team had resigned, been fired, or gone on extended leave.

• ActBlue CEO testifying: Regina Wallace-Jones — agreed mid-May 2026, sworn appearance June 10, 2026 before the House Administration Committee.
• Fifth-Amendment count: 146 invocations across five depositions (July–December 2025), per the April 2026 joint staff report.
• Three named deposition witnesses: Darrin Hurwitz, Aaron Ting, Zain Ahmad — all former ActBlue legal team. Two additional witnesses not publicly named; one identified as the former VP of Customer Service.
• The 237-foreign-IP window: September–October 2024, 30-day period in which 237 donations from foreign IP addresses used domestic prepaid cards (per House Republican report).
• Countries with hundreds of flagged donations: Brazil, Colombia, India, Iraq, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia.
• 22 “significant fraud campaigns” identified, nearly half with foreign nexus — House investigation finding.
• Suspected nation-state actors named publicly by Steil/Johnson: Iran, Russia, Venezuela, China.
• ActBlue’s foreign-gift-card block date: September 6, 2024 (three days after Steil introduced the SHIELD Act).
• 2023–2024 cycle total processed through ActBlue: $3.82 billion.
• Single biggest day: $46.7 million in seven hours following Vice President Kamala Harris’s July 21, 2024 campaign launch.

“Substantial risk that some of the funds received were impermissible contributions from foreign nationals.”

Covington & Burling memo to ActBlue board, early 2025 — reported by The New York Times, April 2, 2026

The Covington memos are the load-bearing factual record here. They document, in writing, from ActBlue’s own outside counsel, a finding that ActBlue’s prior representations to Congress about its foreign-donor screening were inaccurate. Specifically, the memos report that Wallace-Jones’s 2023 letter to House Administration claimed donors with foreign mailing addresses had to supply a U.S. passport number, but that rule was “not always followed.” Donors paying through Apple Pay, PayPal, or Venmo— three of the most-used payment channels on the platform — were not prompted for passport information at all. One Covington memo flagged the risk that “prosecutors believed that ActBlue had tried to conceal facts” — the language of criminal exposure.

By March 2025, every member of ActBlue’s legal and compliance team had either resigned, been fired, or gone on extended leave. By the time the three House chairmen issued their joint statement on the NYT scoop (April 2, 2026), ActBlue had separated from Covington & Burling. The depositions of the legal-team alumni took place in the second half of 2025, with the 146 Fifths.

• House Administration Committee: Chair Bryan Steil (R-WI), Ranking Member Joe Morelle (D-NY). Lead-committee role since 2024.
• House Judiciary Committee: Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH).
• House Oversight & Government Reform: Chair James Comer (R-KY).
• Senate HSGAC PSI: Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI). Coordinating with Steil since October 2024.
• Senate Companion Legislation: Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) — foreign-donation loophole bill.
• Department of Justice: AG Pam Bondi (R) directed to investigate via April 24, 2025 presidential memorandum.
• FBI: classified briefing to Steil on ActBlue at FBI Headquarters, September 2025. (Director Kash Patel (R) not directly named in current press releases.)
• Texas AG: Ken Paxton (R) — civil suit filed April 20, 2026 in Tarrant County under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act.
• President: Donald Trump (R).
• Democratic response: Ranking Members Morelle and Jamie Raskin (D-MD) have characterized the GOP findings as “a partisan attack on Democratic fundraising.” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) criticized the Trump DOJ memo as politically motivated.

“ActBlue has cooperated with Congressional inquiries, producing thousands of pages of documents... has zero tolerance for illegal contributions of any type... foreign contributions constitute less than 1% of the total contributions on the ActBlue platform.”

ActBlue, in its public statement on the House Republican probe

ActBlue’s position is that it has cooperated, that its compliance procedures meet FEC standards, and that the 1%-or-less foreign-donation figure means the probe is disproportionate to the underlying problem. The organization notes that it began expanding CVV verification in 2023, that it implemented the foreign-gift-card auto-rejection on September 6, 2024 via fraud-detection vendor Sift, and that Wallace-Jones’s 2023 letter to Congress was “carefully reviewed by inside and outside counsel and key business leaders prior to submission.”

The Covington memos exist in tension with that defense. The memos came from ActBlue’s own outside counsel, were addressed to ActBlue’s own board, and identified specific gaps (Apple Pay, PayPal, Venmo passport-prompt failure) that the 2023 Wallace-Jones letter to Congress did not disclose. Whether those gaps were closed at scale, whether the foreign-donation share is genuinely under 1%, and whether the 146 Fifth-Amendment invocations reflect lawyer-protected silence or substantive culpability are questions the June 10, 2026 testimony will, at least in principle, begin to answer.

Public congressional testimony is a venue with known limits. Wallace-Jones can:

• Confirm or deny on the record the specific Covington findings about Apple Pay / PayPal / Venmo passport-prompt failure.
• Reconcile or refuse to reconcile the 2023 letter to Congress with the Covington memo’s contrary findings.
• State or refuse to state whether the foreign-donation share remains under 1% after the September 2024 controls were implemented.
• Account or refuse to account for the wholesale March 2025 departure of the legal team.
• Invoke the Fifth herself, which would make her the 146th-plus-one.

What the testimony cannot do is resolve whether any laws were broken — that is a question for the DOJ probe directed by AG Bondi’s memorandum, the Texas civil case under Paxton, and any FBI or grand-jury process that follows. The Civic Intelligence editorial position is the same on this story as on every accountability story: the testimony will go on the record verbatim; we will quote it; we will not pre-judge whose narrative wins.