Lou Montoya

Is El-Sayed's Campaign Funded by Elderly Fake Donors? ActBlue says an 88-year-old widow has given over $150k to Dems over the past five years, but she says that's not possible By Charlie LeDuff @Charlieleduff Milan — Out in the country on a rutted dirt road lined with corn lives an old woman and her dog. Elizabeth Waffle, 88, was forced to move into a shabby trailer two years ago after her house burned down. She owns an old pickup truck but no computer. Nevertheless, Waffle, who lives on a modest pension, is a true believer in liberal causes and continues to make small political donations by way of ActBlue—the Democrat online fundraising platform. But somehow, those few dozen small donations she has made over the past five years have transmogrified into 14,696 donations totaling more than $150,000—the equivalent of eight donations a day, every day for the past five years, averaging $9.18. “One hundred and fifty thousand?” Waffle said with real surprise. “Hell no. I don’t have that kind of money.” She says she has contributed to Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Socialist running for Michigan’s U.S. Senate seat, but not 47 times spanning the last two years, as federal filings show. El-Sayed promises to get money out of politics. He makes a great show of refusing corporate PAC money. But that’s just wordplay. El-Sayed does take special interest money. He takes money from his father-in-law. Most concerning, he takes money from ActBlue. The subject of multiple investigations, the fundraising platform is accused of “rinsing” foreign money and massive private donations by using the stolen names and addresses of real, often elderly Americans to fabricate hundreds of small-dollar donations. Names like Elizabeth Waffle. ActBlue CEO Regina Wallace-Jones recently invoked her Fifth Amendment rights 22 times during a congressional hearing regarding foreign contributions. According to FEC campaign contributions compiled by Bob Cushman, ActBlue shows Waffle donating from her trailer, even though she has no computer and spotty internet access. It also shows her donating from an apartment she rented in town two years ago after her house burned down. Sometimes it shows Waffle donating from both the trailer and the apartment on the same day. It shows her donating to out-of-state candidates she’s never heard of. “This is very abnormal,” said Waffle, who sat in the trailer threshold looking over the paperwork I had brought. “I think it’s wrong, and I think there’s something in there that’s off.” El-Sayed’s campaign brags that he’s the top Michigan fundraiser off the ActBlue platform, having raised 10 times the money from small-dollar donors than his primary opponent, Haley Stevens. Stevens has also taken ActBlue money. As has Slotkin, Whitmer, Nessel, Benson, Gilchrist, and the entire Democrat gang. But it is Abdul who plays the sanctimony card. If he is really serious about getting corrupt money out of politics, then he ought to get off ActBlue and return the money. Anything else is elder abuse.