Elizabeth Waffle is 88 years old, lives on a modest pension in a Michigan trailer she moved into after her house burned down, and does not own a computer. According to federal records, she is also one of the most prolific Democratic donors in America — to the tune of more than $150,000. When a reporter showed her the paperwork, her answer said everything. “One hundred and fifty thousand?” she said. “Hell no. I don’t have that kind of money.”
The numbers, first reported by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Charlie LeDuff for the Michigan Enjoyer and detailed by Breitbart News, are almost too absurd to believe. The handful of small contributions Waffle says she actually made appear in Federal Election Commission filings as 14,696 separate donations over five years — roughly eight a day, averaging $9.18 each. Every one of them routed through ActBlue, the Democratic Party’s small-dollar fundraising machine.
It gets worse. The filings show Waffle donating from her trailer and from an apartment she briefly rented — “sometimes on the same day.” Forty-seven of the donations were logged to Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Socialist running in Michigan’s Aug. 4 Senate primary. Others went to out-of-state candidates the widow says she has never heard of. This from a woman whose internet service is, by her own account, spotty at best.
“This is very abnormal,” Waffle said as she looked over the records. “I think it’s wrong, and I think there’s something in there that’s off.” She is being generous. What the paperwork describes is the textbook signature of donation laundering — real money from an undisclosed source, broken into thousands of tiny gifts and stapled to the name of an elderly retiree who never gave it. And Elizabeth Waffle is not alone. Investigators poring over the same data have flagged hundreds of thousands of dollars “assigned to elderly donors that clearly didn’t give the money.”
None of this is happening in a vacuum. ActBlue CEO Regina Wallace-Jones pleaded the Fifth before the House Administration Committee on June 10 rather than answer questions about the platform’s fraud controls. Reps. Jim Jordan, Bryan Steil, and James Comer have threatened the outfit with contempt over documents it refuses to hand over, and Steil says he has already shared committee findings with several state attorneys general. Of course they are stonewalling. A platform with nothing to hide does not take the Fifth.
This is a window into how the modern Democratic money machine actually works: torrents of small-dollar “grassroots” cash whose true origin no one can trace, papered over with the names of people like an 88-year-old widow who owns no computer and has no idea her identity is bankrolling Democratic Socialists. Where the money is really coming from needs to be investigated — and until ActBlue opens its books, every American has a right to ask what, exactly, it is so desperate to keep hidden.
Source: breitbart.com