ActBlue CEO Invokes Fifth Amendment Repeatedly in Testimony to Congress

WASHINGTON — The chief executive of ActBlue, whose lawyers warned her that she might have misled Congress about how the Democratic fundraising organization vetted its foreign donations, invoked her Fifth Amendment rights and declined to answer questions from a Republican-led House committee Wednesday.

Over and over, the chief executive, Regina Wallace-Jones, declined to engage with questions from Republicans on the House Administration Committee. She had agreed to appear Wednesday morning to discuss the committee’s investigation into the operations of ActBlue, which serves as the small-dollar financial engine of the Democratic Party and its candidates.

She invoked her Fifth Amendment right not to testify 22 times in response to questions from House Republicans, including when Rep. Barry Loudermilk of Georgia asked whether she went by Wallace-Jones or Jones. No Democrat at the hearing posed a question to Wallace-Jones.

Wallace-Jones became a target of the House Republican investigation in April, when The New York Times reported that ActBlue’s lawyers had warned her that she might have misled Congress about how ActBlue vetted its foreign donations. For weeks, she had been in negotiations about how much she is willing to say about ActBlue’s internal discussions.

ActBlue has grown to become the dominant Democratic fundraising platform, building a donor database with millions of credit card numbers. Nearly 23,000 candidates and groups used the site in 2025, ActBlue has said, raising almost $1.8 billion from 52 million contributions.

Federal election law prohibits foreign citizens or people who are not permanent residents from donating directly to federal candidates or political action committees.

Wallace-Jones explained her strategy earlier Wednesday in an opinion essay published in The Washington Post. She wrote that invoking her constitutional right against incriminating herself was “the only reasonable response to a proceeding that from the beginning has been about harassing a political opponent’s fundraising platform, not genuine oversight.”

Democrats at the hearing criticized the Republican effort to investigate ActBlue.

“This hearing is part of a political vengeance and vendetta campaign,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland.

In an exchange of letters this week, Wallace-Jones had signaled that she might not be as cooperative as House Republicans hoped.

On Monday, a lawyer for her wrote to the committee asserting that attorney-client privilege applied to most of the topics that House Republican investigators wished to discuss with her.

She would not, her lawyer wrote, discuss memos that the Times reported on from ActBlue’s previous law firm, Covington & Burling, that detailed inconsistencies in what Wallace-Jones said in a 2023 letter to Congress and how the organization operated. She would also not get into the resignations of ActBlue’s own legal and compliance staff or how ActBlue handled screening of overseas donations or its anti-fraud protections, the lawyer wrote.

“As the committee is aware, the privileged memoranda are and remain protected by the attorney-client privilege and the attorney work-product doctrine,” wrote the lawyer, Nicholas Lloyd McQuaid, who led the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division at the start of the Biden administration. “ActBlue has not waived privilege over the memoranda — or anything else within the scope of the attorney-client privilege and the attorney work-product doctrine.”

The committee responded Tuesday by issuing a formal subpoena to Wallace-Jones to appear in person at the hearing, scheduled for 10 a.m. Wednesday.

Rep. Bryan Steil of Wisconsin, the committee’s chair and a Republican, said in an interview Tuesday that he still hoped Wallace-Jones would engage openly with the committee’s questions.

“My hope is that she is willing to testify honestly and truthfully, because I think I have real concerns about the lack of fraud prevention measures at ActBlue,” Steil said. “If there’s nothing to hide, there is no reason she should have any concerns about answering these questions.”

A spokesperson for the committee said Steil would respond to Wallace-Jones’ invocation of her Fifth Amendment rights at the hearing.

At the heart of the House Republicans’ investigation into ActBlue is reporting from the Times that detailed how Covington’s lawyers warned ActBlue in early 2025 that Wallace-Jones might have misled Congress in a 2023 letter explaining its vetting of donations from other countries.

The committee has gleaned little information from a group of former ActBlue employees it has compelled to testify about the organization’s internal workings. Five former ActBlue officials interviewed have refused to answer more than 160 questions during interviews conducted behind closed doors. Wallace-Jones was to be the first ActBlue official to appear at a public hearing.

ActBlue has long maintained the Republican-led congressional investigation is a political witch hunt. A document circulated to allies Tuesday called the Wednesday hearing “political retribution” and asked Democrats to ask questions about WinRed, the leading online fundraising platform for Republican candidates.

ActBlue’s lawyers and Wallace-Jones have long maintained that she did nothing wrong. In April, Wallace-Jones and other ActBlue officials blamed Covington for what she called “more than a year of navigating tardiness, unpreparedness and counsel that bordered on malpractice.”

A Covington spokesperson declined to address ActBlue’s specific claims about its representation.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Reid J. Epstein/Todd Heisler
c. 2026 The New York Times Company

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