Donald Trump’s campaign staffers are afraid of being spied on with surveillance devices inside their headquarters, a since-fired employee claimed.
The unnamed worker was fired earlier this month but explained colleagues’ fear of surveillance in a disgruntled email, according to The Daily Beast.
The publication did not name the since-fired staffer or the colleague she wrote the email to on October 18. She also did not work directly for the campaign, but rather for Launchpad Strategies, an in-house ad firm, the Beast reports.
In that email, the woman said that Chief Financial Officer Sean Dollman and other staffers were convinced leadership had installed “a listening device in a cut out hole” in a conference room at their headquarters in Florida, the Beast reports.
Dollman owns Launchpad Strategies. In the email, the woman claims he fired her at the direction of senior campaign official Susie Wiles, according to the Beast.
The CFO “has alluded to the fact that he can’t say things for fear of retaliation,” she wrote in the email, according to the Beast. “There are napkins stuffed in all the gaps in the conference room now. It seems like they’re willing to go to extremes.”
Dollman told the Beast the woman was fired “for spreading rumors about clients, and repeatedly showing poor judgment.”
The fired employee also claimed that senior campaign officials Chris LaCivita and Wiles appeared to be funneling millions of dollars to companies that are overcharging the former president, the Beast reports.
“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 reportedly wrote in the email. “I‘m 100% on Team Trump—I want the very best for this campaign, but what I’ve witnessed is greedy and wrong.”
Steven Cheung, communications director for Trump’s campaign, called the claims made in the email “lies.”
“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,” Cheung said in a statement. “The absurd allegation about ‘listening devices’ is not worth responding to in a statement, but instead in a defamation suit.”
