For Immediate Release
September 7, 2026
An unexplainable phenomenon: Millions flow from “Not Employed” phantom donors through AB portals into hundreds of campaigns, including Katie Hobb’s re-election campaign. Explaining the statistically impossible is a perplexing matter, but the devil is found in the details.
Multiple senior figures at ActBlue, the main Democratic small-dollar fundraising platform, have invoked the Fifth Amendment rather than answer questions from House committees investigating alleged campaign finance fraud controls and possible foreign or straw donations. The most recent instance was this week. On September 1, 2026, board member Kimberly Peeler-Allen invoked her Fifth Amendment right during testimony before a joint probe by the House Administration, Judiciary, and Oversight committees. She is at least the third high-profile ActBlue figure to do so. Before that, co-founder Matt DeBergalis pleaded the Fifth in a closed-door deposition on August 20, 2026. The session lasted under 30 minutes.
CEO Regina Wallace-Jones, an individual the EFI has made a person of interest in “magic mortgage” fraud, invoked the Fifth roughly 21–22 times at a public House Administration Committee hearing on June 10, 2026. She declined even to confirm her preferred name. Earlier closed-door depositions of current and former employees produced at least 146 Fifth Amendment invocations, according to a committee staff report.
It becomes easy to understand, when examining public records that allegedly can’t be scrubbed or altered, why these individuals would want to protect themselves from self-incrimination. But, as they say in the West, “that horse has left the barn.“
For example, public campaign finance records of the Arizona gubernatorial candidate, Katie Hobbs, pulled from state tracking portals, reveal a staggering financial anomaly that is, at the least, statistically impossible. Out of 124,793 total transaction records in the dataset, a staggering 72,724 donations—totaling $6,441,331.41—list the contributor’s occupation simply as “Not Employed.”
This is not organic grassroots enthusiasm. This is the mechanical footprint of ActBlue processing automated digital laundering funnels, and Governor Katie Hobbs’ campaign is sitting directly at the receiving end of millions in questionable, high-velocity cash channeled through the platform. As Senator Lloyd Bentsen (D-TX) said about this sort of political chicanery, “A fellow from Texas can tell the difference between grassroots and AstroTurf.“
ActBlue and the Mechanics of the Machine: Thousands of Micro-Transactions From Retirees
Upon close examination of the individuals fueling these massive war chests via ActBlue, the data exposes patterns that defy statistical probability and question human interaction, lending credence to the notion of industrial-scale money laundering.
Consider Denise Montgomery, a 73-year-old retiree from Staunton, Virginia. In federal filings, Montgomery is attached to 4,544 individual contribution records totaling $109,195.15 spread across 282 active days—with 3,082 of those donations flowing directly through ActBlue totaling $54,729.20. On October 31, 2025, alone, her profile logged 110 separate donations totaling $10,095.00 in a single calendar day. The day before, she logged 95 donations.
Similarly, Gregory Maravelas of Fairhaven, Massachusetts, appears across state and federal files with hundreds of recurring micro-transactions channeled through ActBlue—including 428 ActBlue donations totaling $4,283.00—to various campaigns, including massive numbers of entries into Arizona files. That means a human being making entries into a computer or phone 110 separate times in one day—or maintaining a multi-year cadence of dozens of microtransactions daily—a questionable physical possibility. These profiles appear to weaponize the system through automated recurring subscription loops and digital bundling software operated through ActBlue.
Governor Hobbs and her campaign committees cannot plead ignorance to these glaring red flags. When millions of dollars pour into a gubernatorial campaign from individuals categorized as “Not Employed” executing impossible, machine-speed transaction frequencies via ActBlue, accepting those funds crosses the line from routine fundraising into knowing participation in a compromised financial apparatus.
From a strict law enforcement and regulatory perspective, the active acceptance of these ActBlue-processed funds exposes the campaign and candidate to severe criminal exposure:
- Knowing Acceptance of Illicit Funds: Campaign finance laws strictly prohibit accepting contributions routed through straw donors or automated scripts designed to mask the true origin or velocity of funds. When telemetry shows single donors executing upwards of a hundred transactions in 24 hours through ActBlue, any campaign compliance team reviewing basic ledger reports knows—or reasonably should know—that these are not organic donations from private citizens exercising individual free will.
- Wire Fraud (18 U.S.C. § 1343): Every automated electronic transmission of funds pushed across state lines via ActBlue and these compromised digital funnels constitutes a separate execution of a wire fraud scheme. By keeping and utilizing these funds, the campaign benefits directly from systematic electronic fraud.
- Exploitation of Vulnerable Seniors: Utilizing the identities of elderly retirees in their 70s and 80s to funnel thousands of recurring micro-charges through automated scripts touches directly upon elder financial exploitation and identity misuse.
- A.R.S. § 13-2008 (“Taking identity of another person or entity”): A person commits the offense if they knowingly take, purchase, manufacture, record, possess, or use any personal identifying information or entity identifying information of another person or entity (real or fictitious) without consent, and do so:
- with intent to obtain or use that identity for any unlawful purpose, or
- to cause loss to a person or entity (even if no actual economic loss occurs),
- or with intent to obtain or continue employment.
“Personal identifying information” is defined broadly in A.R.S. § 13-2001 and includes names, Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, dates of birth, financial account or credit-card numbers, addresses, biometric data, and similar identifiers. The offense is a Class 4 felony.
Clearly, while key campaigns across America, including the re-election campaign for Katie Hobbs, celebrate a public perception of grassroots—astroturf—building their political war chest on a foundation of algorithmic phantom donations processed by ActBlue, the underlying truth demands closer scrutiny by the appropriate law enforcement and prosecutorial agencies. When any campaign takes millions of dollars from automated loops using the identities of retirees who are physically incapable of making thousands of manual micro-transactions, it ceases to be legitimate political fundraising and enters into the seedy world of campaign finance fraud. It is an automated financial pipeline and industrial-scale money laundering machine—and in this case Governor Hobbs is a knowing participant. This cannot be palmed off on a lower-level employee of the campaign. Even AG Mayes says the candidate is responsible for the actions of their campaign.
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The Election Fairness Institute, Inc. (EFI) is an IRS-approved 501(c)(3) engaged in the analysis of election procedure, process, and system components that demonstrate potential defects impacting election security, transparency, and ultimately integrity. Such defects cut across all political lines and get to the heart of the “Equal Protection” clause of the Fourteenth Amendment for every American citizen.