The Federal Elections Commission (FEC) has received a complaint alleging that the majority of money flowing from groups like Planned Parenthood through ActBlue to liberal causes and candidates is routed through China.
Outlandish? Not to those of us who’ve had this suspicious funding tripod in our sights for years.
This is not some isolated complaint, but rather a pattern of behavior by China, Planned Parenthood and ActBlue to drive U.S. policy to the left — and in a direction more friendly to China. In fact, we believe those three entities combine for most of the money that influences the outcome of U.S. elections.
1990s: The history of investigations into massive Chinese contributions started during Bill Clinton’s administration, when Republican committee members noted that the witnesses they called “fled or pled” rather than come before the Congressional Government Reform Committee
2004: John Zucker and a few colleagues formed ActBlue as the first “pass-through PAC” to collect liberal money with the least possible scrutiny. Bank processors were told not to take normal security steps, such as checking the CVV or billing address, as billions of dollars eventually made their way through the PAC. Without these steps, fraudulent overseas contributions could be as well-camouflaged as voter fraud is in a system without ID or signature-match requirements.
2008: ActBlue was building steam when someone made a mistake. A retired Missouri school teacher named Mary Biskup exceeded the federal limit with $174,800 in credit card donations to President Obama’s campaign. Except she didn’t. This New York Times story followed a report in The Washington Post, after each investigated, to their credit, and reported: not only did Biskup deny giving any money to Obama, her credit card was never charged. Since it was sent through a fake account to which someone had attached Biskup’s name, there was no way to trace the source of the money — or to return it. The Obama campaign was forced to give the contribution to charity. Presumably, Act Blue instituted controls to ensure that no other “donors” would exceed federal limits.
2015: In reviewing some excellent research by Open Secrets, we found that the biggest abuser of political laws governing 501(c)4 activities was Planned Parenthood and its affiliates throughout the country. Interestingly, Breitbart noted that “while Open Secrets produced the research on nonprofits spending more than the IRS allows on politics, the fact that Planned Parenthood dominated their list was not mentioned in its story about the data. Instead, that fact was first noted by Take Back (Our Republic) Action, a conservative campaign finance reform group led by John Pudner, who was quoted in the Open Secrets story.”
2016: After being formed in 2015 to address the billions of dollars being moved into campaigns through unverified contributions such as Biskup’s, Take Back Our Republic Action helped draft the Stop Foreign Donations Affecting Our Elections Act to address murky processes like ActBlue’s. With 83 cosponsors (including more than 30 Democrats), we believe it failed only due to a timing fluke — the Russian Hoax stories — and the polarization resulting from Trump’s 2016 election that prevented passage of this common-sense measure.
2017: Take Back Our Republic Action brought a complaint to the FEC that Facebook was permitted to run political ads without identifying who was paying for them while “paid for by” disclaimers were required of everyone else. We won the case; Facebook ads now require disclosures. This gives us hope that the FEC will likewise issue an opinion closing the ActBlue untraceability loophole.
2020: Leading up to the Biden-Trump election, we published the blockbuster report (retweeted by then-President Trump, Sen. Lindsay Graham and Mark Levin, among others) documenting that nearly $350 million of ActBlue donations were from untraceable, unemployed donors.
2021: Our research uncovered that the President of the University of Pennsylvania secured $50 million from Chinese interests while paying Biden almost $1 million a year for a no-show professor job and the PennBiden Center. We co-authored a formal inquiry to Pennsylvania’s AG and a Newsweek op-ed with George W. Bush’s former ethics czar Richard Painter. After Biden was elected, classified documents were found in the PennBiden Center funded by China.
With all this history, it is no surprise that China, Planned Parenthood and ActBlue again turned up in James O’Keefe’s investigation into ActBlue allegedly laundering money. Election Watch, an election security advocacy nonprofit, has filed a formal FEC complaint, which will turn into a lawsuit in Northern Virginia after the legally-required 120-day waiting period.
If there is serious bipartisan support for stopping foreign influence on our campaigns, then Democratic Senators like Amy Klobuchar and Mark Warner, who backed our measure before Trump’s election, must look hard at ActBlue, Planned Parenthood and China, determined to end this practice once and for all.
John Pudner is president of Takebackaction.org, a nonprofit home for Americans seeking true political reform. The organization's conservative solutions include: working for voter integrity through steps like voter ID; stopping illicit foreign money via groups from impacting elections; and supporting innovations like Instant Runoff/Final-Five voting to take away the opposition's incentive to fund spoiler libertarian or pro-life candidates, that often allow progressive candidates to win with less than 50% of the vote. Read more John Pudner Reports — Here.