For generations, “good-government-minded” Americans have shouted, “We must get the money out of politics!”
Perhaps getting the money out of an industry that literally exists to debate over, collect, and allocate other people’s money was a fool’s errand from the start, but it has nevertheless remained a popular policy goal, and plenty of laws have been passed, at both the state and federal levels, to attempt management of this issue.
One of the most logical and historically-founded approaches has been to ban the acceptance and use of campaign donations from outside the country. Federal law forbids political contributions of any kind from foreign governments, foreign businesses, foreign non-profits, and foreign citizens. Just as non-citizens logically cannot legally vote in our elections, they are not allowed to contribute to political campaigns either.
In addition to this sensible set of restrictions, we have long had limitations on the amount that can be donated, even by those Americans who can legally contribute to a party or to each individual candidate. An individual can only give so much, per candidate, per cycle. At the federal level, even private businesses are forbidden from such contributions. Money must be tracked to an individual, never a company.
Certain sensible exceptions, once thought to be manageable, have been put in place to expand the funding and allow campaigns to go on. Companies and nonprofits can legally establish private PACs that their employees, supporters or volunteers can fund, but these too have spending limits, again, per candidate and per cycle.
Before the internet, before credit cards, before the ease of stolen identities and computerized spreadsheets, it was difficult enough to police such rules. Unions, gangsters and teachers could get around such rules, making prohibited in-kind contributions in secret, in ways that businesses and chambers of commerce could never get away with, had they tried the same.
But in this modern era, policing such violations has become nearly impossible, both because much of the enforcement itself is in the hands of Democrat bureaucrats who simply refuse to enforce laws being broken by – and on behalf of – their own party, and because the sheer numbers in a nation of 340 million people make such analysis extremely difficult to perform.
This brings us to ActBlue, a major fundraising arm for the Democratic Party and for individual Democrat candidates.
In recent years, ActBlue has been exposed for committing virtually countless crimes in the fundraising arena, using its sheer size and the incredible volume of crimes themselves to bury the evidence in plain sight, making discovery extremely difficult.
First, the big picture: The federal government and most states ban businesses, nonpolitical nonprofits, and foreigners from contributing to campaigns; even legal citizens and political nonprofits (PACs) are banned from donating beyond a certain level.
So what do you do when one of them offers anyway?
An honest campaign says “Thanks, but we can’t accept this.”
A dishonest campaign just turns to ActBlue, and splits it up.
Because ActBlue is the primary funding source for Democrat candidates.
ActBlue starts by providing the same services that WinRed does for many Republican candidates – email lists, text message fundraising, acceptance of credit card or debit donations, and reporting.
But ActBlue has long been suspected, and has now been proven in Congressional hearings, as individual cases wind through the courts, of providing one more dubious “service:” the laundering of illegal donations.
Offer a $10,000 contribution that you’re not allowed to make, and ActBlue goes into action, using their extensive computer systems to search through their networks for legal individuals who haven’t yet maxed out, then splits up the money into 500 $20 contributions, or a thousand $10 contributions, all from unknown names that won’t raise an eyebrow when they appear on any contributor list.
When you see $10,000 donors, you notice them, you look at their profession and location, you wonder why they’re donating so much to this obscure congressional or senatorial race on the other side of the country. Such numbers beg for scrutiny.
But when you see $10 and $20 contributions, you skip them over. These are just regular folks, regular neighbors, perhaps young volunteers or old true believers who can’t afford to donate a lot, but who are always good for a ten or twenty for a race they consider noble, even if it’s somewhere across the country.
Nice. A real American perspective. It warms the heart.
Until you see that same name pop up hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times.
We will look at the case of Elizabeth Waffle, an 88-year-old Michigan Democrat who lives in a trailer and could not – under any circumstances – be considered a “fat cat” political donor.
According to records filed with the FEC by ActBlue, she has made nearly 15,000 separate contributions, mostly in the neighborhood of $10 or $15 each to a wide range of candidates, averaging eight to ten times per day, totaling over $150,000 over the past six years.
Elizabeth Waffle definitely made a few of those donations. This is important, because a wise crook won’t attribute contributions to a fictional name; it has to be someone who will show up as a real person if investigators check it at random.
But she couldn’t have made them all. She’s broke, the proverbial retiree on a fixed income. She’s made a couple of $10 or $15 contributions, here and there, and that’s all ActBlue needed to use her as one of their laundering names.
We don’t know yet just how many people like Elizabeth Waffle there are out there, but ActBlue is enormous, and they have plenty of people like her in their books, ready to use and abuse as they did with her.
Need to split up a thousand bucks, or ten thousand bucks, or a million bucks, between hundreds or thousands of names, so we can take in the money and not worry about going to jail? No problem. Nobody will ever notice a bunch of ten dollar donations, especially if they’re scattered across lots and lots of different campaigns.
We only know about Elizabeth Waffle because of the diligent work of Michigan Enjoyer journalist Charlie LeDuff, following earlier, similar discoveries by James O’Keefe and other investigative reporters like them in recent years, going door to door, asking people questions like “Have you ever donated to So-and-So?” “Sure,” they’d say, “I probably sent him ten or twenty bucks once.” “Ah,” comes the response. “Hmmm… but have you given him five, or ten, or twenty or thirty thousand?” And of course they say “That’s silly. I don’t have that kind of money. I donate fifty or a hundred bucks a year, altogether, tops. I’m not rich.”
And then the reporter hands the person a printout from the FEC showing how much has been attributed to his generosity. To which a flabbergasted John Smith can only reply, “Ummm, that must be another John Smith, sir.”
“Another John Smith here, at 1234 Main Street?”
“Oh. Well, then it must be a mistake.”
Oh, it’s clever, but it’s no mistake.
Much like the similarly clever plan of the team of Bialystock and Bloom in the classic Mel Brooks film and musical, “The Producers,” the genius is in basing a crime on such small numbers that they’d never be considered worth digging into. Why look into the books of a play that failed at the box office? It can’t be worth the bother. Similarly, why look into the books of an elderly donor who just contributed ten or twenty dollars? He or she couldn’t possibly be worth the effort to audit.
With such a closed mind, millions of dollars in money-laundering can be buried for years, until the elderly donor is long dead, and nobody will ever know of the hundreds of thousands of dollars attributed to that little credit card.
Or where they really came from.
Again and again, this pattern has repeated itself. ActBlue was called before Congressional hearings this year, and its leaders pled the Fifth. We don’t know on how many candidates’ behalf this crime has been committed, just that it’s happening so much that it calls to mind the Biblical passage about the number of stars in the sky or the grains of sand on a beach.
ActBlue has countless cases now. The challenge is prosecuting it.
Who has standing in court? Obviously the voters, the FEC, the state boards of elections, the opponents of the candidates illegally funded this way.
But the judiciary has largely been co-opted by the Democratic Party, so they slow-walk these cases as much as they can. The issue was first discovered in about 2020, and it’s still going on, as prosecutors resist prosecuting, judges find reasons to stall or dismiss, and uninterest by the mainstream media allows the issue to remain largely hidden from the public.
Meanwhile, they can’t stop. The Middle Easterners who’ve sunk billions of dollars into our colleges need to do the same with our politics. The globalists who’ve sunk billions into controlling businesses and NGOs need to do the same with our legislatures. The Chinese who’ve sunk billions into planting spies in Senatorial and Congressional offices and governors’ mansions need to be sure they can keep on electing politicians to hire them.
The money is there to be distributed.
And ActBlue is there to do the distributing.
Break up the big money, split it up a dozen ways, or a hundred ways, or a thousand ways… and keep on facilitating a way that the foreign money, the excess money, the crooked money, can keep on flowing into the Democrat campaigns that need to spend it.
Reporting on this incredibly massive criminal network, for some of this, we have to use the word “allegedly.”
We don’t know exactly who at ActBlue is accepting these millions in illegal money, who’s splitting it up and redistributing it, or who’s programming their systems to facilitate it.
We can’t name many individual criminals yet.
The suckers – the donors of a dozen five-dollar bills, to whose names hundreds of thousands of dollars have been attributed – are known. They’re all over a million pages of FEC filings and ActBlue printouts, buried in the fine print, mixed in with a million other patsies just like them.
But it’s been proven already, in Congressional hearings. So even though the judicial prosecutions are moving more slowly than molasses, the fact of this corruption is no longer in doubt.
If you ever wondered, how do Democrat candidates get money to run, in races where it seems they have no supporters? How is it that Democrat campaigns can seemingly just flip a switch and have money to spend, when Republicans have to work so hard to raise money?
Well, now you know.
Copyright 2026 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance trainer, speaker, and consultant. His book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), his first nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” and his brand new collection of stories about the heroes of the American Founding, “The Founding Generation: The Patriots Who Built America,” are all available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.
His trade compliance training practice is available either in person or by webinar. And as a member of the Chicagoland theatre community, his current performance is as Archie in Brigadoon in Palatine, Illinois, from October 3 through 18, 2026.
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