Good morning. Welcome to Friday, April 3, 2026. Glad you're with us this morning. Today is Good Friday. No greater love…
1860: The Pony Express starts delivering mail by horse and rider relay teams between St. Joseph, Mo., and Sacramento, Calif.
1926: Second flight of a liquid-fueled rocket by Robert Goddard.
1941: British Prime Minister Winston Churchill warns Soviet leader Joseph Stalin that a German invasion is imminent.
1948: President Harry Truman signs the Marshall Plan to rebuild war-torn Western Europe after World War II, granting an initial $5 billion in aid to 16 European countries.
1958: Fidel Castro's rebels attack Havana.
1968 Science fiction film Planet of the Apes, starring Charlton Heston and Roddy McDowell, opens nationally in the United States.
1971: The Temptations score their second U.S. No. 1 hit with "Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me)."
1973: The first mobile phone call is made in downtown Manhattan, N.Y., by Motorola employee Martin Cooper to Bell Labs headquarters in New Jersey.
1978: Larry King moves his radio show from Miami, Fla., to Washington, D.C.
Birthdays today Include: author Washington Irving ("The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"); American politician and corrupt New York fraudster Boss Tweed; "Dooley" Wilson, American piano player, singer, and actor (Casablanca); British actor Leslie Howard [Stainer] (Gone With The Wind); singer Doris Day; actor Marlon Brando; astronaut "Gus" Grissom; German Chancellor Helmut Kohl; British primatologist Jane Goodall; jazz organist Jimmy McGriff; Jan Berry of Jan and Dean ("Surf City," "Schlock Rod"); singer Billy Joe Royal (Down In the Boondocks), singer Philippé Wynne of the Spinners ("One Of A Kind Love Affair," "I'll Be Around"); singer Wayne Newton; singer Tony Orlando ("Knock Three Times"); actors Alec Baldwin and Eddie Murphy, and Nigel Farage of the UK's Reform Party.
If today is your day, have a happy one.
* * *
Interesting X post from ActBlue this morning, reposted by @ParkerThayer:
ActBlue's comms team is now accusing both the New York Times AND their OWN LAWYERS of lying in the SAME press release.
— Parker Thayer (@ParkerThayer) April 2, 2026
We're in uncharted territory folks, a truly generational comms team meltdown. pic.twitter.com/MU5SQ148so
In response to the bleating from the sheep at ActBlue, the Times released this statement:
A recent post by ActBlue made misleading claims about The New York Times’s coverage of internal disputes at the Democratic fund-raising organization.
The job of news organizations is to report and confirm facts and make the public aware of what is newsworthy, as we did with this coverage.
We reported that a prominent law firm hired by ActBlue concluded that the fund-raising organization had given a potentially misleading response to congressional Republican investigators about how the organization vetted donations to ensure that they were not illegally coming from foreign citizens.
We’re confident in the accuracy of our reporting, which is based on internal legal memos, emails, resignation letters, Slack messages and interviews with current and former ActBlue employees. We reached out to ActBlue about our reporting before publication and included the organization’s response.
This has placed me in what I assure you is a unique and uncomfortable position: defending the Democrat Party’s house organ, The New York Times, of all things.
Argue that the New York Times is lying about ActBlue and its causes, if you like. In this instance, I’ll laugh in your face. I figure that if the story involves Democrats and the stink is strong enough for even the Times to print it, there's undoubtedly proverbial bodies buried somewhere.
However, there’s one thing that is both unambiguous and unarguable: ActBlue senses it's lost control of the narrative, and that control is something it feels unable to survive without.
Its problem with the Times apparently involves some shady fundraising dealings that are currently under investigation by the DOJ, which the Times, uncharacteristically, reported fairly and accurately.
Since the Times has decided to place the real story behind a firewall, and since I refuse to put dime in their pocket, I turn to the Washington Examiner’s Robert Schmad, who reports:
While acting as outside counsel for ActBlue, its then-law firm, Covington & Burling, wrote memos to the Democratic payment processor warning that it may have misled Congress regarding its efforts to block foreign donations, the New York Times reported on Thursday.
“This presents a substantial risk for ActBlue,” Covington & Burling wrote in a memo to the payment processor. The memo laid out how individuals who made contributions through third-party platforms such as Apple Pay, PayPal, and Venmo were, at the time of the letter, not required by ActBlue to submit documentation proving they could legally donate to U.S. political committees — potentially contradicting its letter to Congress.
Understand the depth of this thing. We’re talking about a group that hauled in, according to its own figures, $3.8 billion. If the story is accurate (and I have no doubt it is), ActBlue can’t account sufficiently for its funding sources. That’s what the DOJ is currently investigating. And you just know this is going to end up in front of at least two congressional committees.
It gets better. Fast Company says, in part:
One figure at the center of this divide is ActBlue CEO Regina Wallace-Jones, who joined the organization in 2023 after spending her career working at tech companies (eBay, Facebook, Yahoo) and serving in local government in East Palo Alto. After The New York Times reported on the departures of at least seven senior ActBlue leaders in April, ActBlue sought to cast the moves as part of the “natural turnover after the 2024 election cycle.”
Nothing suspicious here. Go about your lives, citizens. Move along.
But former ActBlue employees and Democratic strategists familiar with the exits told Fast Company that many of the departures stemmed from what one former employee characterized as a “verbally abusive” working environment under Wallace-Jones, marked by “major blowouts.” This employee described Wallace-Jones as deeply distrustful of both the Democratic ecosystem and members of her own staff.
The former employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of being singled out by members of Congress, described a situation in which he briefed ActBlue’s general counsel on a potential sponsorship that could have had legal implications for ActBlue. According to internal communications viewed by Fast Company, Wallace-Jones later chastised the former employee for sharing information with ActBlue’s legal team, suggesting that doing so was tantamount to leaking. (ActBlue declined to respond directly to this claim).
[…]
According to The New York Times’s reporting in April, unions representing ActBlue employees wrote a letter to the board asking it to hire outside counsel to investigate “the current state of the organization and evaluate if our C.E.O. is doing her job in an appropriate, competent and responsible manner.” A spokesperson for ActBlue told Fast Company the firm had in fact “supported an independent and privileged investigation,” which had concluded that the allegations in the letter “could not be substantiated.”
Normally, I’d not bother with the interpersonal and staffing issues, but frankly, the revelations of those issues make me believe that something is rotten at the core of ActBlue, besides its politics. The discussions sound to me strangely like retaliation against whistleblowers. That's always and invariably a red flag. Apparently, they sound that way to the DOJ and Congressional investigators, as well.
And the ‘rats, seeing this, are jumping ship, according to the Fast Company article:
Daniel Garcia, communications director for the Democratic party of New Mexico, said his team began working with another payment platform, GoodChange, in addition to ActBlue, earlier this year, in part due to the ongoing investigations.
“The potential for ActBlue to come under attack certainly is a concern for us,” Garcia said. “In the event something does happen to ActBlue because of the Trump administration, we do want to be prepared and have another option.”
How disappointingly typical. The huge Democrat Party fundraising org gets ratted out by its own people, and who does Garcia blame? Not Act Blue and its leadership. No, he blames Donald Trump.
For all of the problems ActBlue’s issues are creating for Democrats, I don’t see Democrats wanting to cut ActBlue out of the picture. In fact, I don’t see any way they could, really, since ActBlue is pretty much the de facto keeper of democrat donor records. While sure, they could do it, they’d find themselves needing to rebuild the donor database, and that would take more time than they have, particularly for the midterms.
I'll be watching, because this is showing no sign of slowing down.
Thought of the Day: Thank God it's Good Friday.
Take care. I'll see you here tomorrow.
Related: Broward County Board of Elections Back in the News
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