A Trump campaign worker has been fired after trying to blow the whistle on what she called “grift and greed” by top campaign officials—and an alleged “bugging” plot, the Daily Beast has learned.
The worker, whose identity the Beast is withholding, wrote an explosive email after she was fired detailing her concerns about how the campaign’s most senior leaders, Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, appear to be funneling millions of dollars to companies which, she alleges, are overcharging Donald Trump. One of them is run by a major donor to Kamala Harris.
“The grift and greed I’ve witnessed makes me sick and I think leadership has been bad stewards of generous donors money,” the campaign worker wrote in an email to a former colleague after she was abruptly fired on Oct. 18. “I‘m 100% on Team Trump—I want the very best for this campaign, but what I’ve witnessed is greedy and wrong.”
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Even more sensationally, the woman also wrote in her email that campaign employees became convinced that leadership had installed “a listening device in a cut out hole” to a conference room at campaign headquarters in South Florida to eavesdrop on private conversations by their colleagues.
Sean Dollman, the campaign’s chief financial officer was so worried he was being snooped on that he and others searched the conference room in an attempt to find the surveillance device and block its ability to intercept his conversations, she wrote.
Dollman “has alluded to the fact that he can’t say things for fear of retaliation,” the woman added. “There are napkins stuffed in all the gaps in the conference room now. It seems like they’re willing to go to extremes.”
“This is nothing more than fanciful lies and fabrications from a disgruntled former employee of a vendor, and this person apparently was a terrible teammate who also disclosed private, internal information to outside individuals,” the senior campaign official said.
Trump’s campaign team is led by both LaCivita (left), whose LLC has been paid $19.2m so far via the campaign and two PACs, and Susie Wiles (center).
The campaign worker, who has requested that she not be publicly identified, had been responsible for placing Trump’s official campaign ads on platforms such as YouTube and Meta’s Facebook and Instagram. She worked in campaign headquarters for months but was not employed directly by the campaign. Instead she worked for Launchpad Strategies, an in-house ad firm founded and owned by Dollman who, she claimed in the email, had fired her at Wiles’ direction.
In a text message to the Daily Beast, Dollman wrote: “Launchpad made the decision to terminate her for spreading rumors about clients, and repeatedly showing poor judgment.” He declined to respond to further questions about details of the woman’s claims.
The woman in her email does not spell out what she meant by “grift and greed.” But sources told the Daily Beast that the woman had raised concerns for months with Dollman and others about how money for ads was being spent at the direction of LaCivita and Wiles. The issue burst into the spotlight when the Daily Beast revealed how LaCivita’s consulting firm—headquartered in his Virginia home—had already collected $19.2 million from the campaign and two Trump super PACs since 222, much of it from commissions on placing ads, with millions more due him by the end of the campaign.
The campaign worker, who was fired three days after the LaCivita story broke, was not the source of the Daily Beast’s exclusive reporting and, when contacted last week, declined to comment for this story. (The Daily Beast has no reason to believe the emails and documents cited in this story were in any way connected to the recent compromise of the Trump campaign by Iranian hackers.)
The issues raised by the fired campaign worker underscore larger complaints about the lack of transparency in the Trump campaign’s disclosure reports, including an alleged repeated failure to identify the ultimate recipients of millions of dollars in campaign ad spending.
Sources told the Beast that over the summer the ad buyer became concerned that Wiles and LaCivita were farming out 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 firm. After reviewing invoices, she concluded the outside firms were costing the campaign far more for the same business.
The woman, an ad buyer, prepared detailed charts under the title “How the campaign is being overcharged by political operatives.” One of the charts lists payments to Strategic Media Services, describing it as the firm that had been “chosen by Chris, Susie, political operatives in DC,” referring to LaCivita and Wiles. It then lists invoices appearing to show that Strategic Media was charging 32 percent higher fees on commissions than Launchpad was charging.
As for Zeta Global, also “chosen by Chris/Susie,” the whistleblower’s charts shows it charged the campaign $20 million for placing media ads—$6 million more than the $13.9 million that Launchpad would have charged for the same ads.
The whistleblower also noted that David Steinberg, the CEO of Zeta Global, was a significant Democratic donor to the Harris campaign and other Democratic campaign committees.
Strategic Media and Zeta did not respond to emails seeking comment.
The whistleblower’s email makes no direct allegation that LaCivita or Wiles were receiving portions of the higher commissions from the outside media firms, a not uncommon practice in presidential campaigns. Asked if either of the campaign’s two top officials had received such undisclosed payments, the senior campaign official said: “Not true at all and a complete lie.”
Although the senior Trump campaign official described the woman as an untrustworthy “disgruntled former employee” who is not to be believed, an email exchange the woman had with Wiles after she was fired suggests that, at least at the time and in part, the views of her at the highest levels was not quite so harsh.
The campaign worker, after being fired by Dollman, reached out to Wiles to ask if she could get her job back. Wiles did not offer any immediate hope, saying she would give the matter “a great deal of thought,” according to portions of an email exchange that the woman shared with the source who provided it to The Daily Beast.
Wiles, the campaign co-manager, then added: “You are a talented young woman with many wonderful and important qualities. You have a great work ethic, you’re creative and you have an expertise in your field that is impressive.”
Editor’s Note: The original version of this article mistakenly reported that LaCivita’s firm had received a total of $22 million from Trump’s campaign and affiliated PACs. Based on a further review of FEC records, the correct total is $19.2 million. The Beast regrets the error. The article has also been updated to make clear that payments were to LaCivita’s LLC not to LaCivita personally.
