Many Republicans were stunned when Vice President Harris’s campaign raised $1 billion in an incredibly short time. Now there are indications that a significant amount of that money may have come from illegal sources.

So, the next ad you see for Ms. Harris may have been bought with Iranian, Chinese, or drug cartel money. As John Solomon reported in Just the News, Democratic fundraiser ActBlue has been subpoenaed to tell Congress about some fundraising activity which the U.S. Department of Treasury has called suspicious.

According to Mr. Solomon, who has been investigating this system for weeks: “The dramatic developments were communicated to House members and ActBlue itself in a series of memos this week obtained by Just the News that reaffirmed that lawmakers fear foreign adversaries like China, Iran, Venezuela and Russia may be routing illicit foreign money into Democratic coffers by using the names of unsuspecting American donors.”

A Republican professional in Wisconsin, Mark Block, has reported that 385 donations were made in his name through ActBlue. He asserted that 35 of those donations were earmarked to the Harris campaign. As a Republican activist, he never gave one donation through ActBlue. This could be a case of identity theft, and Mr. Block is suing ActBlue under Wisconsin’s anti-racketeering laws.

The pursuit of foreign money by Democrats is not something new. In President Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign, the so-called “Chinagate” scandal disclosed that Chinese and Indonesian business owners had given millions of dollars to the Democratic National Committee using fake names.

I was Speaker of the House at the time. With my support, Congressman Dan Burton and his chief investigator, Dave Bossie, tracked down illegal donors as far away as Hong Kong. Their investigation led to dozens of people being convicted of violating federal campaign finance laws and several going to jail.

Four years later, Vice President Gore held a fundraiser at the Hsi Lai Buddhist Temple. He raised $166,750, including $55,000 from the monks and nuns who had taken vows of poverty (they were apparently illegally reimbursed by the temple). Eventually, a Senate investigation found that the couple who organized the event had close ties to the Chinese Communist intelligence services.

The Clinton-Gore foreign money violations were in a pre-internet era. They required the cumbersome and slow use of paper. Now it is possible to mask large donations by turning them into an enormous number of small donations. This is a technique called “surfing.”

According to the New York Post’s Miranda Devine, money laundering experts working for the House Administration Committee and its chairman, Congressman Bryan Steil, “analyzed over 200 million Federal Election Commission records spanning the last 14 years to identify suspicious trends such as hundreds of donations of $2.50 from the same individual.”

The defendant in Mr. Block’s lawsuit is “John Doe,” an unidentified donor. The credit card used in the donations is linked to an address in Santa Monica, Calif.

According to Mr. Block’s lawsuit: “By making these fraudulent donations, John Doe participated in the operation of ActBlue’s particular business model: providing small donor campaign contributions to Democratic campaigns and organizations to advance left-leaning policies … Defendant John Doe has used [Block’s] personal identifying information to benefit the ActBlue Campaigns and circumvent federal requirements prohibiting the use of another person’s name to make political contributions.”

As Mrs. Devine reported, Mr. Steil referred his findings of “potential criminal activity” to the Republican attorneys general of Arkansas, Florida, Missouri, Texas, and Virginia in September.

It should not surprise us that Iran, China, Russia, and transnational crime syndicates in South and Central America could be willing to exploit the weaknesses of the American political fundraising system.

Each has a big interest in a Harris presidency. They know that Ms. Harris would be much softer and easier to work around than President Trump.

The Roman Republic started to crumble when foreign kings learned it was cheaper and safer to bribe Senators than to fight the Roman Army. The scale of wealth and power within the American system poses an enormous danger of the same kind of civic decay and corruption, which destroyed the Roman Republic and paved the way for the Roman Empire.

We must rethink our campaign contribution system so everything is transparent. No foreigners should be able to buy influence in America by buying elected officials.

ActBlue owes it to every American to open its books and help us find out which donations were fraudulent. The Harris campaign and the other campaigns would then have the obligation to pay back the illegal donations. This is potentially a genuine crisis of the American system of self-government.