Smurfing At Work

AP Photo/Susan Walsh

You know that $200 million that has been raised for Kamala Harris through ActBlue?

I have every reason to believe that the money is real but that many or most of the contributors are fake because ActBlue is basically a money-laundering operation by the evidence. 

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Campaigns generally don't have to report smaller donations by individuals, but ActBlue does because of its legal status. There is a searchable database of all the donors and their donation levels, and despite that fact, the mainstream media has been singularly incurious about how the organization collects the money and from whom it comes. 

Only citizen journalists like James O'Keefe have looked into ActBlue, and because the left has stigmatized O'Keefe, the mainstream media is given permission to explore what he has discovered. 

And what he has discovered is obvious money laundering, and ActBlue goes out of its way to enable the process by turning off verification from its credit card portal. 

The results speak for themselves. People on fixed incomes are recorded to have donated tens of thousands of dollars to candidates and organizations when they clearly have not. 

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O'Keefe has taken the time to visit some of these superdonors, and they have no idea about where the money came from, and credibly deny that they made the donations. And how could they? They are people who donate in the tens of dollars, not tens of thousands. 

Why would ActBlue use this technique? 

It's simple: there is a limit to the amount that anybody can contribute to a campaign and foreign donors are prohibited from giving to political candidates. In order for wealthy donors to get around that limit they use a technique called "smurfing," in which people are wittingly or more likely unwittingly used to launder money. And since ActBlue has turned off credit card verification there is no way to trace the money back to its origins. 

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O'Keefe believes at least some of the money comes from foreign donors or even foreign governments, but I have no idea if that is true. What I do know is that people, when asked, are denying that they are dumping their life savings or multiples of it into PACs and candidates. 

Just today, after some of these videos were dropped, the Attorney General of Virginia opened an investigation into the matter. No doubt it will be impossible to prove anything before this election or perhaps the next, but at least there is now official action being taken to investigate and hopefully expose the scam. 

Is ActBlue engaged in money laundering? Almost certainly, yes. Is it washing foreign donations? I have no idea. How could we know?

During the 2012 campaign, the Obama campaign was accused of using similar techniques to launder money because its donation platform didn't use verification to determine the location of a donor, allowing foreigners to donate to his campaign. There's really no easy way to check where the money is coming from because the process is designed to make fraud easy. 

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Do we have irrefutable proof that ActBlue is artificially flooding money into the Harris campaign? Not yet. 

But I bet we will find it, either before or after the campaign. If you or someone you know suspects that ActBlue may have used your name to launder money, go to the FEC website and look up your name. 

I looked up a relative's name and he supposedly contributed 143 times in the past 18 months, and over 900 in the past 12 years. I am trying to track down whether that is plausible. I'll update this post when I find out. 

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Ed Morrissey 10:00 PM | November 20, 2024
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