Trump Campaign Worker Blows Whistle on ‘Grift’ and Bugging Plot

Story by Michael Isikoff. October 28, 2024.

@RalphHightower: Trump has been a grifter1, a con man as long as he has been a businessman. It is ironic that the table has been turned, even though it is on a smaller scale.

  • Whistleblower Allegations: A Trump campaign worker was fired after alleging that top campaign officials were involved in “grift and greed,” funneling millions to overcharging companies.
  • Surveillance Concerns: The worker claimed that campaign leadership installed a listening device in a conference room to snoop on private conversations.
  • Campaign Response: Senior campaign officials dismissed the allegations as lies from a disgruntled former employee.
  • Financial Mismanagement: The worker raised concerns about excessive spending on ads, suggesting that outside firms were overcharging compared to the in-house firm.

Allegations in West Palm Beach HQ:

  • Leadership installed listening device in a conference room.
  • Leadership appears to be funneling millions of dollars to companies which, she alleges, are overcharging Trump. One of them is run by a major donor to Kamala Harris.
  • 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.

““The grift and greed I‘ve witnessed makes me sick and I think leadership has been bad stewards of generous donors money. I‘m 100 % on Team Trump—I want the very best for this campaign, but what I’ve witnessed is greedy and wrong,” the campaign worker wrote in an email to a former colleague after she was abruptly fired on Oct. 18. “

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.

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 $22 million from the campaign and two Trump super PACs since 2022, much of it from commissions on placing ads, with millions more due him by the end of the campaign.

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.2

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.

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.”

  1. @RalphHightower: “grifter” • Merriam-Webster: verb
    \ ˈgrift <br />grift​ed; grift​ing; grifts
    Definition
    transitive ​verb
    : to obtain (money or property) illicitly (as in a confidence game)
    intransitive ​verb
    : to acquire money or property illicitly
    Other Words
    grift noun
    grift​er noun ↩

  2. @RalphHightower: That’s typical Trump. ↩