Donald Trump’s supporters have threatened the consultancy firm Deloitte with the loss of lucrative government contracts if he returns to the White House after the election in November because one of its employees leaked critical comments about his presidential performance made by his running mate, JD Vance.
The Republican nominee’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, led the warnings of retribution after the Washington Post published correspondence that showed Vance expressing negative views about the Trump administration long after he claimed he had become a supporter. The correspondence also showed Vance forecasting – accurately – that the former president would lose the 2020 election to Joe Biden.
Ethics experts seized on the threats to punish Deloitte for the actions of an individual employee and warned that it might be a harbinger of how a second Trump administration would use its power over the federal government.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Kedric Payne, the senior director of ethics at the non-partisan Campaign Legal Centre, told the Washington Post. “You can’t imagine that if one employee out of thousands made a statement that offended an official, that then the government contracts would be in jeopardy.”
The Post did not name the individual to whom Vance had expressed the anti-Trump messages privately on social media but merely reported that their recipient had shared them with the paper.
However, in a post on X, Trump Jr – who was instrumental in persuading his father to install Vance as his running mate – revealed the correspondent to be a consultant working at Deloitte. He suggested that the company’s contracts with the US government should be annulled.
“An executive at @Deloitte … decided to interfere in the election & leak private convos with JD Vance to help Kamala Harris,” the former president’s son said.
“Deloitte also gets $2B in govt contracts. Maybe it’s time for the GOP to end Deloitte’s taxpayer funded gravy train?”
Trump Jr tagged the Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, in his message and attached a screen shot of Deloitte’s contracts with the government and the employee’s company profile.
The post, which has received more than 2 million views and been retweeted 13,000 times, was circulated by Vance’s spokesperson, William Martin, and followed up by the rightwing news site, Breitbart. The site ran a story naming the Deloitte employee in question, focusing on his job.
Jason Miller, an adviser to Donald Trump Sr, reacted to the post by writing that the employee “FAFO”, short for “fuck around and find out”.
Trump Jr followed up his original 27 September post with another two days later, saying: “We’re not forgetting this.” That was shared by Eric Schmitt, a Republican senator for Missouri, who called the matter “outrageous” and demanded that Deloitte “immediately and publicly respond to this scandal”.
Trump Jr justified his comments about the firm’s government contract in a statement to the Washington Post, saying the employee “had a right to leak the communications, Washington Post had a right to print them and … I have a right to speak my mind about where my tax dollars go”.
Vance’s messages examined by the Post – reported to have been triggered by an essay the Deloitte employee had written about the relationship between Catholicism and politics – reveal a far more negative view of Trump’s presidency as it approached the end of its term than he has previously acknowledged.
In February 2020, he wrote: “Trump has just so thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism (excepting a disjointed China policy).”
“I think Trump will probably lose,” Vance wrote in June 2020 in a forecast of the outcome for that year’s election, which he subsequently falsely claimed was stolen by the Democrats, echoing the former president.
Vance has previously admitted to being a former critic of Trump, who he labelled around the time of his 2016 election triumph as “cultural heroin” and “America’s Hitler”. But Vance claims he was won over by Trump’s performance as president.
• This article was amended on 7 October 2024. Eric Schmitt is a senator from Missouri, not Montana as an earlier version said.
