Ranking Member Raskin Slams Republicans’ Vindictive and Partisan Investigation of ActBlue, Cover-up of WinRed Fraud
Washington, D.C. (June 10, 2026)—Today, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, delivered opening remarks at a Committee on House Administration hearing on Republicans’ vindictive and partisan investigation into ActBlue, a donation platform used by Democratic candidates around the country, while they ignore far more significant and troubling fraud allegations surrounding Republican platform WinRed.
Below are Ranking Member Raskin’s remarks at today’s hearing.
WATCH Ranking Member Raskin’s opening statement.
Ranking Member Jamie Raskin
Committee on House Administration
Hearing on “Preventing Fraudulent Donations: Transparency, Verification, and Accountability”
June 10, 2026
Thank you kindly, Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member Morelle, for the invitation. It’s great to be back here in the intimate quarters of the House Administration Committee.
The hearing is called preventing fraudulent donations, transparency, verification and accountability. That sounds like a valuable inquiry to me. The problem is that, as we all know, that’s not what the hearing is really about. If it were, our colleagues would have first submitted testimony from the CEO of WinRed, the fundraising platform that has generated hundreds and hundreds of serious fraud complaints from individual Americans, mostly Republicans, including a lot of elderly Americans and Americans with disabilities who say they’ve been robbed, blind, hoodwinked by WinRed, in many cases fleeced out of their life savings.
But the Republican chairs of our committees have repeatedly refused to conduct any oversight or investigation into the WinRed platform that processes donations for over 7,800 GOP campaigns and committees across the United States, including all the GOP senators and 97% of GOP House members. Well, that’s just not a serious approach to the problem. This hearing is really part of a political vengeance and vendetta campaign that yesterday came to the House Judiciary Committee in the form of a four-hour hearing interrogating the President of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
After the 2020 election, banks and credit card issuers estimated that WinRed fraud cases constituted as much as 3% of their total national fraud workload across all transactions. That is a shockingly large share, given that there are 150 million credit card transactions that American consumers and businesses engage in every single day in the country between January 2022 and June 2024. The FTC received more than 800 complaints about WinRed, nearly seven times the number it got about ActBlue in the final months of 2020 alone. The Trump campaign, RNC and their shared accounts had to issue more than 530,000 refunds worth more than $64 million. That’s more than 11 times the amount that the Biden campaign and the Democratic committees had to refund.
And yet, who have the Administration and our GOP colleagues focused on exclusively from the beginning? ActBlue, the company that primarily processes contributions for Democratic campaigns around the country. Last April, the White House issued a Presidential Memorandum directing the AG and Treasury to “use all lawful authority” toinvestigate ActBlue, which, according to the white house, facilitated “straw” or “dummy” contributions or foreign contributions to political candidates and committees. But as Americans can see each day, every accusation by this Administration is an admission, every allegation a confession, every charge a self-indictment.
The arraignment of ActBlue is an admission about WinRed continuing serious fraud against their donors. An Associated Press review of President Trump’s political committees found more than 1,600 contributions from unverified donors who lived abroad, had close ties toforeign interests, or failed to disclose basic identifying information. Many of those contributions came through WinRed. AP reported that one Chinese businessman gave $5,000 toTrump through WinRed while listing a La Quinta Inn as his home address.
Other contributions came from unnamed donors listing 999 Anonymous Drive as their address. Another series of WinRed contributions listed the donor’s address as a vacant building in Washington that turned out to be a defunct funeral home. Where is all of the righteous outrage about these abuses? Where is the mobilization of taxpayer resources to investigate WinRed. Where is Attorney General Ken Paxton, who was impeached by the Texas House of Representatives for bribery, securities fraud, abuse of office and obstruction of justice? Attorney General Paxton sued ActBlue in April, but his office has ignored complaint after complaint from Texas constituents about the allegations of fraud and abuse related to WinRed.
Who were the victims of WinRed that Ken Paxton deliberately ignores? Well, one Texas woman tried to make a small, one time contributions to Republican candidates that she supported. WinRed emptied more than $15,000 out of her bank account, including charging her account 29 times in one day. She wrote to Attorney General Paxton that she “didn’t realize they were sucking my life savings out of my bank account.” He never even wrote her back. And if that’s how partisan Republicans treat Republicans, you can imagine how they’re going to treat everybody else in the country.
One Republican donor from Fort Worth complained that WinRed siphoned $11,000 from his account without any personal authorization from him. He wrote, “I’m 81 years old and I’ve been taken advantage of.” He’s still waiting for a response from Attorney General Paxton. Why isn’t he here today testifying about what’s actually taking place toour people? CNN reported that 1 82-year-old woman, wearing pajamas with holes in them when they interviewed her because she didn’t want to spend money on new pajamas, was swindled of more than $350,000 of her life savings that she had no idea she was giving to Republicans through WinRed. This is what real fraud looks like. Why don’t we investigate it?
Attorney General Paxton, who himself uses WinRed, systematically ignored all of these desperate constituent complaints. But somehow, the day after James Talarico, Mr. Paxton’s opponent in his Senate race, raised a remarkable $2.5 million in a 24-hour period from ActBlue, Mr. Paxton suddenly decided to investigate ActBlue and dispatch undercover investigators to troll ActBlue business practices. Meantime, Paxton has consistently ignored oversight letters that Ranking Members Morelle, Garcia and I have sent to him. But whistleblowers come forward every day about WinRed fraud.
Just this week, my office got a whistleblower tip from a woman in Colorado, a registered Republican, who said she gave $100 through WinRed, which WinRed turned intorecurring weekly $100 contributions without her permission. She’s been fighting over these fraudulent charges since February, contacting WinRed and the Republican National Committee, but has gotten absolutely nowhere. So she reached out to my office for help. And if that’s the way that Republicans treat Republicans, it makes sense to me that Donald Trump has the lowest opinion ratings of any President in decades.
But it’s not just Paxton covering up WinRed fraud. Last summer, we asked the Treasury Department to turn over all suspicious activity reports its financial monitors have gotten related to WinRed. And we asked FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson to turn over all complaints related toWinRed. CNN has revealed that WinRed had been used to defraud hundreds of elderly Americans and mislead specifically people battling dementia and other cognitive impairments, including, Alzheimer’s disease, into giving away millions of dollars far more than they ever intended, far more than their families could afford. But the Treasury Department and the FTC have refused to turn over any documents or even answer our letters. They’ve refused to explain why they won’t turn over the documents.
But one detail in CNN’s report provides a hint. The single biggest beneficiary of all these small dollar donations from these unwitting recurring donors was none other than Donald Trump, the founder of Trump University.
There are some obvious things that we can and should do to stop online fundraising abuse across the board politically. In 2021, the FEC recommended that Congress ban prechecked recurring donation boxes so we would know that any recurring donations are unauthorized and legal. That would have prevented many, if not most, of the deplorable, fraudulent practices that have swindled millions and millions of dollars of people’s life savings in Texas and all across the country. That was common sense when it was unanimously recommended by the FEC. And it’s common sense today. Can we agree to that? How about today? I’d support that today, but I fear this hearing is not about making any positive policy changes. It’d about hauling in the CEO of ActBlue, forcing her to take the Fifth Amendment. You know, Donald Trump’s taking the Fifth Amendment 440 times. So before anybody starts denouncing the Constitution of the United States, think about what you say about people who invoke the Fifth Amendment against petty political vendettas and, and prosecutions.
This is exactly the kind of thing that the Fifth Amendment was designed to be there for. The Supreme Court has said the Fifth Amendment protects the innocent as well as the guilty people who might be ensnared by ambiguous circumstances—and we can see today—also ensnared by political vendettas and partisan investigations. Instead of seriously looking at a problem and trying to address it, that’s what we should be doing there. There are obvious problems across the board. Most of them relate to WinRed, but I’m sure some of them could relate to ActBlue too. Why aren’t we seriously addressing that? Why does everything have to be the occasion for partisan exploitation and persecution, instead of actually doing the business of the public?
We’re waiting for a lot of answers from WinRed. I hope that we will get them, and I hope that we can have real change with a real investigation and a real hearing.
I yield back and thank you, Mr. Chairman.