patrick.net

“ActBlue, the online fund-raising organization that powers Democratic candidates, has plunged into turmoil,” the Times grimly reported, “with at least seven senior officials resigning late last month and a remaining lawyer suggesting he faced internal retaliation.” ...

If anything happens to ActBlue, the Democrats face a serious fundraising setback...

Wrestling to keep its expression neutral, the Times ironically reported that “what prompted so many longtime ActBlue officials to leave is not clear.” Haha, it’s not clear to Times readers. But we know.

This is not so much an exodus of top officials as it is an evacuation.

The rats who fled this week included the vice president of customer service, the associate general counsel — the highest-ranking legal officer at ActBlue — the assistant research director, a human resources official, the chief revenue officer, and an engineer who spent 16 years building the software handling the flow of donations. Godspeed. ...

Over the last two years, the progressive fund-raising behemoth has become increasingly embroiled in a “smurfing” scandal. Diligent independent investigators, beginning with James O’Keefe and his citizen journalists, discovered that ActBlue routinely runs hundreds or thousands of small-dollar donations for the same donors. And those same small donors are often low-income folks or are retired and living on a fixed budget.

More scandalously, O’Keefe and his sleuths interviewed some of these donors who denied not only making the donations but even having the ability to make the many donations.

The timing is telling. For Democrats — staring down a rampaging Trump behemoth — right now is the absolute worst time for the smurfing investigation to get under steam and start popping up in corporate media. If, as the Times suggested, Republicans pass new laws restricting lax loopholes allowing unverified small donations, it could be game over, at least for the foreseeable future.

Some people have speculated that smurfed small-donor support is a fraud that lets foreigners and blue billionaires launder money through the fund-raising platform to skirt campaign finance limits. If that is true (and I happen to believe it is true), then candidates face appalling new needs to fundraise the old-fashioned way, which they have completely forgotten how to do, as evidenced by their bizarre fetishes with promoting vaccine mandates and gender-bending surgeries for children.