DOGE keeps finding so many examples of fraud with our tax dollars that it makes your head spin. It’s difficult to keep up with all of it. Every day it seems like we find ourselves thinking, “Now THIS is the biggest financial scandal of all time,” only to have it surpassed by something else the following day.
Here’s a huge financial scandal (perhaps the biggest one of all time!) that was uncovered this week and it didn’t involve DOGE. Republican and Democrat Senators have been caught laundering illegal donations into their campaigns to the tune of millions of dollars.
Is this where all that Ukraine money is going?
A voting integrity group called Election Watch uncovered this scandal. It’s called “Smurfing” and was named that after it was originally discovered that Obama’s ActBlue organization was engaging in it. WinRed, the Republican equivalent of the money-laundering scandal, has been caught Smurfing as well.
Before we get to the US Senators who are raking in millions of dollars in illegal donations, let’s look at how Smurfing works.
First, your identity is stolen. There’s nothing complicated about this part. ActBlue or WinRed simply takes your first and last name off the voter rolls. You are now a “Smurf.” Congratulations.
ActBlue and WinRed then proceed to make thousands of individual donations to candidates in your name. These donations are kept small—usually around an average of $10.
If you run a campaign or a PAC and a person donates more than $200 to you, you are required by the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to gather at least some identifying information about that person. If they donate less than $200, there’s no such requirement. An individual was only allowed to legally donate $3,300 to a candidate in 2024 and $5,000 to a PAC.
Let’s pull one Smurf at random from the state of Arkansas:
A Smurf named Anthony B. lives in Harrisburg, AR. In 2024, Anthony B. made 5,622 donations to Sen. Tom Cotton’s reelection campaign. Anthony B. sent an average of $11.07 to Sen. Cotton’s campaign each time, for a total of $62,243.
Is it more likely that Anthony B. sat there at his computer and made 5,622 donations to Tom Cotton to exceed FEC limits, or that someone used Anthony B.’s identity in order to illegally launder money to Cotton’s reelection campaign?
I guarantee you that Anthony B. did not sit there and make 15 donations per day to Tom Cotton for a full year. There are thousands of people whose identities have been stolen and are being used against their knowledge to funnel millions of dollars in illegal campaign contributions to incumbent politicians to keep them in office.
The money is coming from China, the US Treasury, USAID, and other sources. It’s probably how a lot of that Ukraine cash is ending up back in the pockets of bloodthirsty US Senators like Tom Cotton who want to keep the war going forever.
Here are some of the additional politicians who have benefitted from Smurfing, according to Election Watch:
Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA): $13,791,015
Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI): $29 million
Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH): $31 million
Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC): $8.1 million
Sens. Michael Bennet & John Hickenlooper (D-CO): Combined $59 million
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY): $1.1 million
These are just the tip of the iceberg, according to Election Watch. They’ll be running all 100 Senators and all 435 Representatives through their analysis. One example of a campaign that received thousands upon thousands of Smurfing donations was Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), according to Election Watch. Gallego inexplicably defeated Kari Lake in Arizona in the 2022 midterm elections to become the state’s newest US Senator.
Gallego collected $17 million in Smurfing contributions from ActBlue. Most of the money was small donations from Smurfs living in Massachusetts ($8 million).
The FEC might actually be in on this scam. There needs to be a full DOJ investigation into how these politicians are laundering money illegally into their campaigns.
Keep in mind that the “Smurfs” are victims in this. Their names are simply being used without their knowledge by shady people and organizations that are laundering the money.
You can check your own name to find out if you have been a victim of Smurfing at Check My Donation. If someone has been making suspicious or illegal contributions in your name, you can report it directly at that link.
