On August 20, Matt DeBergalis walked into a closed-door deposition on Capitol Hill and walked out twenty-five minutes later. He co-founded ActBlue, the online platform that collects small-dollar donations for nearly every Democratic campaign in the country. Three House committees had questions about how foreign money reached the platform. DeBergalis answered none of the questions. He invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination instead.

But he is not the exception. ActBlue's chief executive, Regina Wallace-Jones, took the Fifth at a public hearing in June. Five current and former ActBlue employees have invoked it 146 times, and the House Judiciary Committee reports they did so "in response to every single one of the Committees' substantive questions." By March 2025, every member of ActBlue's legal and compliance team had left the company or gone on leave.

The Democratic Party spent a decade telling America that nobody is above the law. They meant Trump. The platform that raises the party's money won't answer a question under oath. Neither will the group that names its enemies. And the coalition that party built is being taken away by people who are worse.

Democrats wrote the rule when the defendant was Trump

On June 9, 2023, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries issued a statement on the federal indictment of Donald Trump. "No one is above the law - including Donald Trump," they wrote. The case "must now play out through the legal process, without any outside political or ideological interference."

And that is the standard ActBlue now refuses. Nobody there is letting the legal process play out. It stops at the first question.

ActBlue's own counsel called it knowing and willful

For ten years the accusation ran the other direction. Trump was the foreign agent, the man who owed something to Moscow. The foreign money turned up on the Democrats' own platform.

ActBlue hired its own outside counsel to look. Foreign nationals can't legally give money in American elections. That review found "a substantial risk" the platform had taken foreign money anyway, and that staff knew enough to make the violations look "knowing and willful." ActBlue loosened its fraud controls at least twice in 2024 while its own assessments predicted more fraud. ActBlue's training told the fraud team to "look for reasons to accept contributions." Wallace-Jones wrote to Congress in 2023 that foreign donors had to verify a passport. Counsel said her letter could be seen as an effort to conceal the foreign money. ActBlue board chairwoman Kimberly Peeler-Allen acknowledged up to $38 million in 2024 donations showed signs of foreign origin.

A hatchet job does not empty a compliance department

Robert Kuttner, who co-founded the liberal American Prospect, wrote ActBlue's defense there. The campaign against the platform, he says, is "a partisan hatchet job, but ActBlue itself is far from blameless." He invented the first half. A hatchet job doesn't make your own attorneys write "knowing and willful." It does not empty your compliance department. ActBlue's lawyers ran that review, and then nobody at ActBlue would repeat a word of it under oath. Taking the Fifth is a right, not an admission. That does not explain why five people needed the Fifth 146 times about a review their own company paid for.

And foreign money has reached this party before. Eric Swalwell sat on the House Intelligence Committee while he was sleeping with a suspected Chinese intelligence operative who went by Christine Fang. Declassified files released this month have Swalwell admitting the relationship, and have the FBI finding Fang broke election law by routing donations through other people's names. Nancy Pelosi left him on the committee.

First nobody answers. Now nobody shows up.

The Southern Poverty Law Center spent decades deciding which American groups belonged on its hate list, and in April a federal grand jury charged the Alabama nonprofit with wire fraud and conspiring to launder money.

The group asked the court to throw the case out as political payback. On August 7, Judge Emily Marks refused. Federal courts, she wrote, "are not the proper forum for airing political grievances." Four days later the government came back with more charges. A new indictment added Heidi Beirich, who ran the project behind the hate list. Prosecutors allege that between 2007 and 2023, more than $4 million in donated money was secretly funneled to people tied to violent extremist groups.

Beirich was arraigned on August 25. She did not go.

Her lawyers entered the plea by video. One of them said he will ask to move the October trial to late January. The woman who spent years telling the country who the dangerous people were won't sit in a room and say where the money went.

Corruption is how the socialists got in

So the Democratic Party is failing on its own books too. The Democratic National Committee's latest filing shows about $16 million in cash against nearly $18 million in debt.

Voters form impressions without reading a single indictment, and the impression here is that the people running the party are corrupt and will not answer for it. That is the opening the socialists walked through. Zohran Mamdani took the mayor's office in New York. Abdul El-Sayed won Michigan's Democratic Senate nomination. Both won because the mainstream of their own party looks rotten, and nobody in that mainstream could call them corrupt with a straight face.

But that is an explanation, not a defense. The communists and antisemites moving into the Democratic Party are worse than the people they are replacing. They took the party honestly. The people who were supposed to hold it would not answer for themselves.

Schumer and Jeffries asked America to let the legal process work without interference. The answer coming back from their own side is a closed door, an empty chair, and a request to push the trial to January. The socialists taking the party away from them are worse. They are also the only ones still showing up.