A self-described citizen journalist out of Michigan is telling a story that, if even partially true, should scare the life out of anyone who still thinks campaign finance is just boring paperwork and yard signs. Bob Cushman says he has spent years digging through Federal Election Commission donation data and believes he is staring at a “smurf” pipeline, thousands of tiny-dollar donations that look like grassroots enthusiasm on paper but smell like laundering when you actually run the numbers.
His origin story starts in October 2019, when he says he downloaded FEC data and noticed three Michigan members of Congress were receiving around 75 percent of their incoming donations from out of state. That is not automatically illegal, people donate across state lines all the time. But Cushman’s point is about the ratio and the pattern. He wrote to Attorney General William Barr, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and the U.S. Attorney in southeast Michigan, asking for an investigation into possible conduit donations, also known as straw donors, which is illegal under federal law. He says he never got a meaningful response.
He claims the pattern got louder in 2023 after Gov. Gretchen Whitmer hired the high-powered Democratic consulting firm GMMB, and her fundraising allegedly exploded, 100-fold in dollars and 265-fold in number of donations. Cushman’s implied question is simple. Did better marketing suddenly create an army of small donors, or did it “facilitate” a firehose of suspicious micro-donations routed through people whose identities were being used like disposable napkins?
He points to reporting from Election Watch and researcher Peter Bernegger, who argues that “smurfs” are often seniors whose names and addresses appear on enormous numbers of tiny donations that don’t pass the common-sense test. Cushman highlights “Cory Booker smurfs” and “Mark Kelly smurfs,” groups of elderly “donors” allegedly responsible for millions of dollars across tens of thousands of transactions. He even flags donations that allegedly occurred after some listed donors had died, which, if verified, is not a quirky coincidence. It is a flashing red siren.
Cushman also ties his thesis to the broader ActBlue controversy, noting that President Trump ordered the DOJ in April 2025 to investigate foreign money and straw-donor schemes, with ActBlue specifically in the spotlight. He cites a conversation involving campaign strategist Jason Roe suggesting that people inside campaigns have known for years how “soft money” can be converted into valuable “hard money” through a blizzard of small donations.
Here’s the bottom line. Cushman is making allegations, not securing convictions, and spreadsheets are not subpoenas. But when the same “donors” appear to give thousands of times, at bizarrely small amounts, across dozens of committees and candidates, the adults in the room should not shrug and call it “politics.” They should investigate it like fraud, because if it’s real, it’s not just cheating. It’s theft of representation. And that’s the kind of crime that breaks a republic without firing a single shot.
Sources: The Gateway Pundit
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