'Grift and greed': Whistleblower from inside Trump campaign makes explosive claims
An ad buyer who said she was fired by the Donald Trump campaign after trying to expose alleged "grift and greed" by top campaign officials and deep distrust at the operation's highest levels has spoken out to the Daily Beast.
The fired worker told the Beast under the condition of anonymity that she wrote an email after she was terminated that laid out her concerns that the campaign's most senior leaders — Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles — appeared to be directing millions of dollars toward companies that may be overcharging the former president. One of them, she said, is run by a major Kamala Harris donor.
“The grift and greed I‘ve witnessed makes me sick and I think leadership has been bad stewards of generous donors money,” the campaign employee wrote to a former colleague after her Oct. 18 firing. “I‘m 100% on Team Trump — I want the very best for this campaign, but what I’ve witnessed is greedy and wrong.”
The woman also alleged that campaign employees had become convinced that leadership had installed a "listening device" in a conference room at the West Palm Beach campaign headquarters, and she said chief financial officer Sean Dollman was so concerned that he and others rummaged through the conference room to find the device.
“[Dollman] has alluded to the fact that he can’t say things for fear of retaliation,” the woman said. “There are napkins stuffed in all the gaps in the conference room now. It seems like they’re willing to go to extremes.”
Sources told The Daily Beast that the woman became so concerned over the summer that Wiles and LaCivita were sending large digital ad purchases to outside firms Strategic Media Services and Zeta Global instead of using the campaign's in-house Launchpad firm — for which she worked — and she concluded the outside firms were charging far more for the same work.
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The woman doesn't specify in her email what she meant by "grift and greed," but sources said she had raised concerns for months with Dollman about ad money spending by LaCivita and Wiles, and she was fired three days after The Daily Beast revealed last week that LaCivita's consulting firm had already raked in $22 million from the campaign and two Trump super PACs, although she was not the source of that report.
“Launchpad made the decision to terminate her for spreading rumors about clients, and repeatedly showing poor judgment," Dollman told The Daily Beast, but declined to comment further on her firing.
The whistleblower alleges that Zeta Global, a company run by Democratic donor David Steinberg that was chosen by LaCivita and Wiles, had charged the campaign $20 million for placing media ads, which she said was significantly more than the $13.9 million that Launchpad would have charged.
She does not directly accuse LaCivita or Wiles of receiving a cut from the higher commissions from outside firms, and a senior campaign officials tersely responded to questions about them receiving undisclosed payments.