Congress Seeks Cooperation From Former Biden Lawyer in ActBlue Probe

Three House committee chairs are asking a former Biden White House counsel to comply with their investigation into Democrat fundraising platform ActBlue, after the counsel in her private practice issued a blistering review of ActBlue’s process for screening out foreign contributions.

Dana Remus, the former White House counsel, is now a partner at the Democrat-leaning Washington, D.C., law firm Covington & Burling LLP, contracted to perform a review of ActBlue. The Remus-led review criticized the platform’s safeguards against illegal foreign donations and also said that ActBlue CEO Regina Wallace-Jones possibly misled Congress on fraud concerns.

The letter to Remus is from House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio; House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman James Comer, R-Ky.; and House Administration Committee Chairman Bryan Steil, and is based largely on New York Times reporting on the clash between ActBlue and Covington & Burling.

“According to the Times, after the 2024 election, you prepared and delivered to ActBlue two memoranda concerning fraud on the platform and ActBlue’s response to it,” the letter says. “Because you have firsthand information about ActBlue’s response to allegations of pervasive fraud on its platform, the Committees write to request your voluntary cooperation with our oversight efforts,” the letter adds.

ActBlue, a Democrat fundraising juggernaut that hauled in $3.82 billion in the 2024 election cycle, has consistently denied any wrongdoing in the matter. The group has said it has a strenuous process to prevent fraudulent or foreign donations, and it blamed House Republicans and the Trump administration for pushing what it calls a partisan investigation. It has also been critical of Covington & Burling.

A Remus memo found “it could be alleged that [ActBlue’s] violations” of federal campaign finance law “were ‘knowing and willful.,” according to the letter. It notes another memorandum addressed allegations that Wallace-Jones may have made “false or misleading” statements to the Committee on House Administration in 2023 about preventing suspicious donations.

“You found that there was a risk of prosecutors concluding that Ms. Wallace-Jones misrepresented ActBlue’s use of passport verification tools for donations with signs of foreign origin, because such fraud-prevention ‘steps’ ‘were not always followed,’” the letter says.

The letter notes that ActBlue called the Covington & Burling team “tardy” and “unprepared,” and said its work “bordered on malpractice.”

“It is remarkable that ActBlue so publicly smeared you, especially given your service for President Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign and as White House Counsel during the Biden-Harris administration,” the three House chairmen said in the letter to Remus.

In April, ActBlue posted a response to the New York Times reporting on the Covington & Burling findings, asserting, “the truth is a very different story than what is being reported.”

“Our CEO, Regina Wallace-Jones, never made false statements to Congress,” the response says. “Her correspondence was reviewed and approved by multiple in-house and outside attorneys before it was submitted. That includes the same former attorneys who are now characterizing it differently to the press.”

The ActBlue statement continues: “More than a year after approving the letter, those attorneys raised concerns about potential misinterpretation by bad-faith actors. Our CEO informed the board immediately and brought in additional outside counsel to inform our path forward.”