#actblue

I honestly thought the President of the United States using the Department of Justice to potentially take away an opposition party's ability to fundraise for elections would have gotten more attention.

Act Blue

Buyer beware, Newsom is a Scammer!

Posted Wednesday, February 05, 2025 6Am ESTd

Tuesday, January 06, 2026 5Am EST

@Sec_Noem @AGPamBondi @FBIPatel @realDonaldTrump @DOGE

ActBlue took the Fifth. Again. And again. And again.

Did you weaken fraud standards to help Democrats? Fifth Amendment.

Did you accept foreign money? Fifth Amendment.

Did you lie to Congress? Fifth Amendment.

ActBlue is a money laundering operation for foreign donations into Democrat campaigns.

Covington & Burling may be right in the middle of it.

Drag them in. Put them under oath. Get answers.

- Mike Davis via GETTR, 6-10-26

******

Liz Dye at Public Notice:

Ken Paxton got smacked down in federal court. Again. In his 11 years as Texas attorney general, Paxton has launched hundreds of performative lawsuits and investigations. His targets included: Twitter (making Elon Musk mad); Media Matters for America (same); swing states (disenfranchising Texas Republicans by registering too many Democrats); Bexar County (same); Target (Pride T-shirts); the NCAA (trans athletes); the state bar (investigating his ethical misconduct); and the State Fair of Texas (banning guns after a shooting). For the most part, it all came to nothing. Paxton got a couple news cycles boosting his image as a culture warrior, then wandered off to the next outrage. As a crimefighting strategy, it’s worthless. But as a political strategy, it’s brilliant.

Paxton was indicted for securities fraud just weeks after being sworn in as AG; he was impeached by the Texas House in 2023 for abusing his office, only to be acquitted by the Senate after key witnesses were pressured not to testify; and he’s currently under investigation by the Federal Election Commission, which flagged nearly $883,000 in apparently illegal donations to his own Senate campaign. And yet, he was popular enough to knock Sen. John Cornyn out in the primary by implying that the longtime Republican was some kind of RINO squish.

Paxton is perhaps the purest distillation of the modern Republican philosophy that the law is a tool, shame is for losers, and the only thing that matters is using the machinery of your office to hurt your enemies and dominate the news cycle. He also pioneered the use of Texas courts — both federal and state — to project power across state lines into blue states. But this time, Paxton tried to use his office to kneecap his Democratic rival James Talarico. And now a judge in Massachusetts has shut him down in humiliating fashion, highlighting the difference between Texas law and “real” law as it’s practiced in the rest of the country.

Act crazy

Republicans have long hoped to cripple Democrats by taking out the fundraising platform ActBlue. The GOP analog WinRed racks up several times more complaints, and yet the Trump’s Justice Department is investigating ActBlue for supposedly failing to weed out foreign donors. Paxton launched his own investigation of ActBlue in 2025, when Democratic legislators left the state to deny Republicans a quorum to pass gerrymandered maps. Paxton sued Beto O'Rourke's Powered by the People PAC in Tarrant County, where a Republican judge immediately barred the PAC from paying expenses for the Democratic lawmakers and ordered ActBlue to not move any donated money out of state. The theory was that O’Rourke had violated Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act (DTPA), a consumer protection law, by deceiving donors about the intended use of their money. Within two weeks, the case had been reversed on appeal, and after vowing that he’d "stop at nothing," Paxton moved on to the next attention-seeking stunt.

But then on February 18 of this year, Talarico announced he had raised $2.5 million in a single day, $2.2 million of it through ActBlue. The very next day, investigators in Paxton’s shop bought a pile of VISA and Mastercard gift cards and started making $5 and $10 test donations on ActBlue (but not WinRed). Most of these donations were rejected, but in April, just as Talarico was due to file his next FEC fundraising report, Paxton turned up again in Tarrant County court with a lawsuit alleging that ActBlue violated the DTPA.

[...]

Dangerous loser

Paxton’s trollsuits almost always detonate on impact with a real court. But that doesn’t make him harmless. The donor-fraud theory — that a nonprofit or political organization has defrauded its supporters by soliciting money for one purpose and using it for another — didn’t die when Judge Mehta blocked the subpoenas, or when Judge Stearns called it out for the massive assault on the First Amendment that it is. In fact, it’s the basis for the Justice Department’s indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which it accuses of taking donor money to dismantle hate groups while secretly funding them via a network of paid informants.

Forum-shopping has now become standard operating procedure for the DOJ as well. Just as Paxton parks cases in Tarrant County, where a friendly judge will sign off on patently illegal subpoenas of his political enemies, the Trump administration has begun parking politically harassing investigations in the federal courthouse in Fort Worth, where they’re virtually guaranteed to get in front of Judge Reed O’Connor. When the administration wanted to seize transgender children’s medical records from a hospital in Rhode Island, it went to O’Connor, a bare knuckles partisan who is perfectly willing to pretend he has nationwide jurisdiction. In some sense, Paxton is a legal vanguard for the MAGA movement. Because he’s utterly shameless and willing to breach every legal and ethical rule, he effectively clears the way, normalizing prosecutorial abuses that other Republican lawyers would previously have balked at. The legal theories and practices that he road tests wind up in the Republican mainstream. For all his buffoonery and courtroom losses, Paxton is genuinely dangerous for democracy and the rule of law. It’s up to Texas voters whether his reign of terror will come to an end, or whether he’ll get a chance to bring his particular brand of corruption to the Senate.

US Attorney General Pam Bondi announced federal charges against Cooper Frederick, 24, in the firebombing of the Tesla dealership in Loveland, Colorado.

BONDI: "There will be no negotiating. We are seeking 20 years in prison. I’ve made it clear, if you take part in the wave of domestic terrorism against Tesla properties, we will find you, arrest you, and put you behind bars."

🚨 This may be the biggest campaign-finance scandal in U.S. history — and it’s being buried. 🚨

On the PBD Podcast, Vinny held up a receipt that should have blown the doors off the story: a campaign donation tied to Minnesota — not Washington — flowing back into the political orbit of Tim Walz.

That’s when the picture snaps into focus.

What’s happening in Minnesota doesn’t just look like welfare fraud anymore — it looks like a money-laundering pipeline.

🎙️ PBD Podcast:

“We’re seeing public assistance money routed through small networks… and then pieces of it come back into campaigns.”

Here’s the pattern investigators are now circling:

1️⃣ Massive public funds pour in (childcare, Medicaid, COVID relief).

2️⃣ Shell nonprofits and care centers bill for kids and patients who don’t exist.

3️⃣ Money moves offshore.

4️⃣ Fragments return as small political donations — the same smurfing mechanics critics accuse ActBlue of using.

5️⃣ Oversight freezes. Media goes silent.

🎙️ PBD Podcast:

“If he talks, they show where the money came from. If he doesn’t, the system stays intact.”

So ask the obvious question: Why aren’t the networks touching this?

Because campaign money doesn’t stop with politicians.

Every two years, it flows straight into network television ad buys. Elections are insanely profitable for media.

🎙️ PBD Podcast:

“If this story breaks wide, it doesn’t just hurt politicians — it destroys the revenue model.”

Think about it.

When government dumps trillions into the economy, it ends up on Wall Street.

Same principle here.

Public funds → offshore → campaigns → media.

That’s the loop.

That’s why this story is radioactive.

And if these dots connect, Minnesota becomes ground zero for the biggest campaign-finance reckoning ever.

Sunlight fixes this.

Accountability fixes this.

The text reads:

Robert Reich here. Social Security is in the worst crisis of its history.

And not because it's running out of money or fraud or administrative costs. This crisis was created by Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

Field offices are being shut down. Hold times for customer service calls are hours-long. The website crashes. More than 12% of the staff has already been pushed out. And Trump plans to ultimately fire nearly half of its workforce.

I served on the Social Security board of trustees. I know how critical this program is for the 73 million Americans who rely on it. We cannot let Trump and Musk destroy Social Security.

Trump swore he wouldn't touch it. But he and Musk have a step-by-step plan to destroy one of our nation's best and most popular public programs:

1. Lie to create a pretext for actions undermining beneficiaries' access to benefits.

2. Impose deep cuts to staff and services to sabotage its ability to serve seniors.

3. Jeopardize the reliability of its systems by sharply reducing staff with tech expertise.

4. Threaten the security of our sensitive personal information by giving Musk's untrained DOGE minions access to it.

The final step? Watch the entire system collapse.

Inequality Media Civic Action has launched a major campaign to sound the alarm and mobilize people to contact Congress.

Will you donate $50, $25, or even just $3?

>> https://ineq.us/s/BAkpHk

Thank you for all you've done and continue to do to help us educate the public and stop Trump and Musk's attack on Social Security.