Matt DeBergalis, co-founder of ActBlue — the platform that has processed roughly $20 billion in donations for Democratic candidates — walked into a closed-door congressional deposition on Wednesday, invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, and walked back out. The whole thing lasted approximately 25 minutes.
That is not how someone with nothing to hide spends a Wednesday morning.
The deposition was conducted jointly by three House committees: the Committee on House Administration, the House Oversight Committee, and the House Judiciary Committee. All three are investigating whether ActBlue's fraud prevention standards allowed foreign and fraudulent donations to flow into American campaigns. DeBergalis was there to answer questions. He answered none of them.
House Administration Committee Chairman Bryan Steil, Republican of Wisconsin, didn't hide his frustration. "It's unclear how serious ActBlue is now taking fraud," Steil said. "Did they make the changes needed?" He added: "What is so frustrating — they have a right to not answer. American people have a right to know."
DeBergalis isn't even the first ActBlue executive to take this route. CEO Regina Wallace-Jones invoked the Fifth Amendment multiple times during a public hearing before the House Administration Committee on June 10, 2026. The hearing was titled "Preventing Fraudulent Donations: Transparency, Verification, and Accountability." Wallace-Jones apparently had no interest in any of those three things.
So the co-founder won't talk. The CEO won't talk. The platform has moved $20 billion through Democratic campaigns, and the people who built it and run it would rather invoke constitutional protection against self-incrimination than explain how the money works. At some point, the pattern stops being a legal strategy and starts being an answer.
The congressional investigation into ActBlue began in 2023. A committee report from April 2025 concluded that ActBlue executives were "aware that both foreign and domestic fraudulent actors are exploiting the platform but do not take threat seriously." Since then, ActBlue has updated its donation process to require credit card CVV numbers — a basic verification step that, notably, wasn't in place during the billions of dollars in transactions that preceded it.
The Fifth Amendment exists for good reason. Nobody disputes that. But there's a difference between a defendant in a criminal trial protecting himself from prosecutorial overreach and the leadership of a $20 billion political fundraising operation refusing to tell Congress whether foreign money got into American elections. One is a constitutional safeguard. The other is a corporate firewall dressed up as a civil liberty.
Twenty billion dollars. Two executives. Zero answers. The investigation started three years ago, and ActBlue's entire leadership would apparently rather sit in a congressional hearing room and say nothing than explain where the money came from.
When silence is the strategy, the money is usually the problem.