The ActBlue chief executive, whose own lawyers warned her that she might have misled Congress about how her organization vetted its foreign donations, will invoke her Fifth Amendment rights when she testifies before a House committee, she wrote in an opinion essay published on Wednesday in The Washington Post.
Regina Wallace-Jones wrote that she would not engage in questions from the Republican-led House Administration Committee, which she had agreed to appear before on Wednesday morning to discuss the committee’s investigation into the operations of ActBlue, a Democratic payment processor.
Ms. Wallace-Jones became a target of the House Republican investigation in April, when The New York Times reported that ActBlue’s lawyers had warned her that she might have misled Congress about how ActBlue vetted its foreign donations. For weeks, she been in negotiations about how much she is willing to say about ActBlue’s internal discussions.
ActBlue has grown to become the dominant Democratic fund-raising platform, building a donor database with millions of credit card numbers. Nearly 23,000 candidates and groups used the site in 2025, ActBlue has said, raising almost $1.8 billion from 52 million contributions.
Federal election law prohibits foreign citizens or people who are not permanent residents from donating directly to federal candidates or political action committees.
In her opinion essay, Ms. Wallace-Jones wrote that invoking her constitutional right against incriminating herself was “the only reasonable response to a proceeding that from the beginning has been about harassing a political opponent’s fund-raising platform, not genuine oversight.”
Ms. Wallace-Jones’s announcement, published hours before she was scheduled to appear before the committee, followed an exchange of letters this week that signaled she might not be as cooperative as House Republicans had hoped.
On Monday, a lawyer for Ms. Wallace-Jones wrote to the committee asserting that attorney-client privilege applied to most of the topics that House Republican investigators wished to discuss with her. She would not, her lawyer wrote, discuss memos that The Times reported on from ActBlue’s previous law firm, Covington & Burling, that detailed inconsistencies in what Ms. Wallace-Jones said in a 2023 letter to Congress and how the organization operated. She would also not get into the resignations of ActBlue’s own legal and compliance staff or how ActBlue handled screening of overseas donations or its antifraud protections, the lawyer wrote.
“As the committee is aware, the privileged memoranda are and remain protected by the attorney-client privilege and the attorney work-product doctrine,” wrote the lawyer, Nicholas Lloyd McQuaid, who led the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division at the start of the Biden administration. “ActBlue has not waived privilege over the memoranda — or anything else within the scope of the attorney-client privilege and the attorney work-product doctrine.”
The committee responded Tuesday by issuing a formal subpoena to Ms. Wallace-Jones to appear in person at the hearing, scheduled for 10 a.m. Wednesday.
Representative Bryan Steil of Wisconsin, the committee’s chairman and a Republican, said in an interview on Tuesday that he still hoped Ms. Wallace-Jones would engage openly with the committee’s questions.
“My hope is that she is willing to testify honestly and truthfully, because I think I have real concerns about the lack of fraud prevention measures at ActBlue,” Mr. Steil said. “If there’s nothing to hide, there is no reason she should have any concerns about answering these questions.”
A spokesman for the committee said Mr. Steil would respond to Ms. Wallace-Jones’s invocation of her Fifth Amendment rights at the hearing.
At the heart of the House Republicans’ investigation into ActBlue is reporting from The Times that detailed how Covington’s lawyers warned ActBlue in early 2025 that Ms. Wallace-Jones might have misled Congress in a 2023 letter explaining its vetting of donations from other countries.
The committee has gleaned little information from a group of former ActBlue employees it has compelled to testify about the organization’s internal workings. Five former ActBlue officials interviewed have refused to answer more than 160 questions during interviews conducted behind closed doors. Ms. Wallace-Jones was to be the first ActBlue official to appear at a public hearing.
ActBlue has long maintained the Republican-led congressional investigation is a political witch hunt. A document circulated to allies on Tuesday called the Wednesday hearing “political retribution” and asked Democrats to ask questions about WinRed, the leading online fund-raising platform for Republican candidates.
ActBlue’s lawyers and Ms. Wallace-Jones have long maintained that she did nothing wrong. In April, Ms. Wallace-Jones and other ActBlue officials blamed Covington for what she called “more than a year of navigating tardiness, unpreparedness, and counsel that bordered on malpractice.”
A Covington spokesman declined to address ActBlue’s specific claims about its representation.
www.nytimes.com