Donald Trump Campaign Staff Blows Whistle About ‘Fraud’ and Wiretapping Plot in Bombshell Email

A Trump campaign staffer was fired after she tried to blow the whistle on what she called “fraud and greed” and an alleged “wiretapping” scheme by top campaign officials, The Daily Beast has learned.

The worker, whose identity the Beast hid, wrote an explosive email after he was fired detailing his concerns that the campaign’s top leaders, Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, appeared to be funneling millions of dollars to the companies he claimed. He’s overloading on Trump. One of them is run by a major donor to Kamala Harris.

“I am sickened by the fraud and greed I have witnessed and think the leadership are poor stewards of generous donors’ money,” the campaign staffer wrote in an email to a former colleague after he was abruptly fired on October 18. “I’m 100% with Team Trump — I want the best for this campaign, but what I’ve witnessed is greedy and wrong.”

More sensationally, the woman also wrote in her email that campaign staffers were convinced the leaders had planted “a listening device in a cut hole” in a conference room at West Palm Beach Headquarters to listen in on their colleagues’ private conversations. The campaign’s finance chief, Sean Dollman, was so concerned that he was being spied on that he wrote that he and others searched the conference room in an attempt to find the surveillance device and thwart his ability to eavesdrop on his conversations.

The woman added that Dollman “insinuated that he couldn’t say things for fear of retaliation.” “There are now napkins stuffed into every space in the conference room. “It seems they are ready to go to extremes.”

“This is nothing more than imaginary lies and fabrications by a disgruntled former employee of a vendor who apparently was also a terrible teammate who disclosed private, internal information to outsiders,” the senior campaign official said.

The campaign staffer, who requested that his identity not be publicly disclosed, was responsible for placing Trump’s official campaign ads on platforms such as YouTube and Meta’s Facebook and Instagram. He worked at the campaign headquarters for months but was not assigned directly to the campaign. Instead he worked at Launchpad Strategies, an in-house advertising firm Founded and owned by Dollman He claimed in his email that he fired her on Wiles’ instructions.

“Launchpad has made the decision to terminate him for spreading rumors about his customers and consistently making poor decisions,” Dollman wrote in a text message to The Daily Beast. He declined to answer further questions about the details of the woman’s allegations.

The woman in her email doesn’t explain what she means by “fraud and greed.” But sources told The Daily Beast that the woman had been raising concerns with Dollman and others for months about how advertising money was being spent at the direction of LaCivita and Wiles. The issue came to the fore as The Daily Beast revealed. Revealed how LaCivita’s consulting firm worksThe company, based at its home in Virginia, had raised $22 million from the campaign and two Trump super PACs since 2022; Most of this money came from ad placement commissions, and millions more would have to be paid to him by the end of the campaign.

The campaign staffer, who was fired three days after the LaCivita story broke, was not the source of The Daily Beast’s exclusive reporting and declined to comment on the story when contacted last week. (The Daily Beast has no reason to believe that the emails and documents cited in this story are in any way connected to the recent compromise of the Trump campaign by Iranian hackers.)

The issues raised by the fired campaign staffer underscore larger complaints about a lack of transparency in the Trump campaign’s disclosure reports; repeated failure to identify the ultimate recipients of millions of dollars in campaign ad spending.

Sources told the Beast over the summer that the ad buyer was concerned that Wiles and LaCivita were outsourcing large digital ad buys to two outside firms, Strategic Media Services in Arlington and Zeta Global in New York, rather than using the campaign’s in-house Launchpad. He said he heard it. firm. After reviewing the invoices, he concluded that outside firms were costing the campaign much more for the same work.

The woman, an advertising buyer, prepared detailed graphics under the title “How political agents overcharge the campaign.” One chart lists payments to Strategic Media Services, describing it as the firm “chosen by D.C. political operatives Chris, Susie,” referring to LaCivita and Wiles. It then lists invoices showing that Strategic Media charged 32 percent more in commissions than Launchpad charged.

As for Zeta Global, also “chosen by Chris/Susie,” the tipster’s charts show it charged the campaign $20 million to place media ads; That’s $6 million more than the $13.9 million Launchpad would charge for the same ads.

The tipster also noted that Zeta Global CEO David Steinberg is a major Democratic donor to the Harris campaign and other Democratic campaign committees.

Strategic Media and Zeta did not respond to emails seeking comment.

The tipster’s email does not contain a direct allegation that LaCivita or Wiles received some of the large commissions from outside media firms; This is not an uncommon practice in presidential campaigns. Asked whether any of the campaign’s two top officials had received such undisclosed payments, the senior campaign official said: “It’s not true at all and it’s a complete lie.”

Although Trump’s top campaign official described the woman as an untrustworthy, “disgruntled former employee,” this is not to be believed; an email exchange the woman had with Wiles after she was fired shows that those views were at least the same at the time and in part. His attitude at the highest levels was not so harsh.

After being fired by campaign staffer Dollman, she reached out to Wiles and asked if she could get her job back. Wiles did not offer any immediate hope, saying he would “give it a lot of thought,” according to portions of an email exchange the woman shared with the source who provided it to The Daily Beast.

Campaign co-manager Wiles added: “You are a talented young woman with many wonderful and important qualities. “You have a great work ethic, you are creative, and you have impressive expertise in your field.”