The Carolina Journal covered this story last year, but it has suddenly gained a lot more traction. In short, ActBlue, a digital platform for Democratic Party fundraising, is attributing extremely high contributions, generally through frequent small donations, to individuals who do not appear to be the actual donors and will readily admit this to anyone in the media who cares enough to ask.

Stephen Horn, an independent journalist covering politics in the Triangle and North Carolina generally, did a lot of the early reporting on the issue.

In one video, Horn visits a North Carolina man living in a modest apartment and asks him about the $26,000 he’s reportedly made to Democrat groups, including $15,000 through ActBlue. The man, who has made donations to Democrats in the past, is shocked, saying he’s retired and on a limited income and could never afford donations like that.

He’s said that at times he gave more than he thought he should, but that it was $15 or $20, nothing in the range in the FEC documents. He said that he would have definitely noticed if that kind of money had been deducted from any of his accounts.

So where did the money donated under his name come from then?

That’s what many want to know. The issue laid dormant for a while, but after Kamala Harris raised over $100 million in 36 hours of her taking over the reigns of the Democratic presidential nomination, much of it through ActBlue, questions reemerged. One recent viral TikTok video, shown below, pulled heavily from the Carolina Journal’s coverage and Stephen Horn’s reporting from last year.

People began to notice more widely beyond North Carolina, and it burst onto the national stage, with similar patters emerging in other states. Charlie Kirk, a major conservative media personality, posted on the issue and asked why state attorneys general were not taking action.

In Virginia, where a few especially fishy examples were exposed, their state attorney general, Jason Miyares, told Kirk they are aware and are “looking into it.”

Current US Congressman Dan Bishop, R-NC8, who is running to be our attorney general, simply said, “January 1,” suggesting if he were to win his race, it would be one of his first priorities once sworn in.

Could there be a simple, innocent explanation for why people who gave small amounts a few times are listed as giving large amounts many times? Maybe. Maybe in these cases, ActBlue accidentally duplicated the same name over and over again in their reports instead of recording the legal and legitimate donor. Or, maybe ActBlue recorded the correct names and donation amounts, but the FEC got their wires crossed somehow and jumbled the data.

There could even be other non-nefarious explanations that are not as simple. But there is also the possibility that the Democratic Party has tapped into large funding sources that can’t be legally accepted. And rather than turn down these funds, they decided to launder that money through ActBlue and similar platforms, splitting the money into many small donations and attributing it to real (but minor) donors.

It almost seems too stupid to believe they’d try to pull something like that off. Maybe they assumed that if anybody ever asked these real Democrat donors, “Did you donate to ActBlue,” the person would just say, “Yes,” and that would be that. But whoever was supposed to spread these donations around must not have done so thinly enough, or the money needing laundering may have just grown too large to effectively escape notice.

If they were stupid enough to pull off campaign-finance fraud of this magnitude, they will have undoubtedly left a papertrail, considering how poorly hidden this conspiracy was. I would not be surprised to see congressional hearings investigating the issue in addition to the attorneys general of a few states demanding these records. If Bishop wins his race in November, it appears North Carolina’s attorney general will be among them.