Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway announced Sept. 25 that her office is investigating ActBlue, the online fundraising platform used by nearly 23,000 Democratic candidates and progressive groups that raised $1.8 billion in 2025. The probe follows a referral from the U.S. House Committee on Administration, and it lands amid a broader fight where a federal judge has already ruled one similar Republican effort was retaliatory, and where every ActBlue employee and board member House investigators have questioned over the past year has invoked the Fifth Amendment rather than answer.
What Missouri Is Investigating
Hanaway’s office issued a Civil Investigative Demand under the Missouri Merchandising Practices Act, giving ActBlue until 10 a.m. CT on Oct. 8 to produce documents and communications. The office says it is examining whether faulty or deliberately weak donor-verification processes let foreign money reach Missouri campaigns, whether prepaid or gift cards were used to obscure the source of donations, whether some contributions were made under false names or without the listed donor’s knowledge, and whether ActBlue suppressed employees who raised fraud-prevention concerns internally. “When political fundraising is compromised, public trust and the foundations of our democracy are put at risk,” Hanaway said. “Political fundraising must never become a pathway to deception, influence, or special treatment.”
The House Referral and the Fifth Amendment Pleas
Missouri’s investigation follows work by three House committees, Oversight, Administration and Judiciary, which have questioned ActBlue employees and board members over the past year. CEO Regina Wallace-Jones invoked the Fifth Amendment 22 times at a public House Administration hearing in June. Five former employees invoked it in closed depositions, a combined 146 times according to committee investigators, and five board members, Matt DeBergalis, Kimberly Peeler-Allen, Marc Laitin, Muthoni Wambu Kraal and Benjamin Rahn, did the same in depositions whose transcripts were released Sept. 17. House Republicans describe that group as every ActBlue employee and board member they’ve questioned. Invoking the Fifth Amendment isn’t evidence of wrongdoing on its own; Wallace-Jones has said it was her only available response to what she considers a partisan proceeding. House Administration Chairman Bryan Steil said “ActBlue’s own admissions raise serious questions about its fraud prevention practices, including a so-called passport verification process that did not actually verify or check entries against any government database.” That description concerns whether ActBlue independently confirmed passport numbers against a government system, not whether it collected them in the first place.
ActBlue’s Defense
ActBlue has pointed to a third-party forensic review of its own 2023 contribution data. The review found that of nearly $990 million in that year’s political contributions, 99.99 percent came from donors who supplied a U.S. address or a U.S. passport number, and that only 0.13 percent of contribution dollars came from Americans living abroad. In one sampled quarter, the review found just 36 donors out of 1.9 million unique addresses had selected “United States” while entering a foreign address, a discrepancy totaling $3,136. A spokesperson called the Missouri action part of a coordinated Republican effort to target the platform while voting is underway, and said ActBlue’s systems are designed to accept contributions only from U.S. citizens or permanent residents.
The Paxton Precedent
Missouri’s probe isn’t the first state action against ActBlue. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office had been examining the platform since at least 2023, and revived that inquiry the day after James Talarico, his eventual general-election opponent for a U.S. Senate seat, announced raising $2.5 million in 24 hours following a national television appearance, before filing suit on April 20, 2026. Both men were competing for their own party’s nomination at the time, not yet facing each other in the general. U.S. District Judge Richard G. Stearns of the District of Massachusetts blocked that suit with a preliminary injunction, finding it violated ActBlue’s First Amendment rights. Stearns pointed to that timing, and to Paxton’s own public statements after filing, as evidence the suit was retaliation for ActBlue’s fundraising on Talarico’s behalf. Paxton has appealed. That ruling doesn’t determine anything about Missouri’s separate investigation, and it doesn’t mean every state inquiry into ActBlue follows the same pattern. It does establish that at least one federal court has found one such action to be politically motivated rather than neutral enforcement.