Supporters of Donald Trump accused Deloitte of consulting firm Deloitte in November, saying one of its employees had made comments critical of vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance’s performance as president. He threatened to lose lucrative government contracts if he returned to the White House after the election.
The Republican candidate’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., has released correspondence The Washington Post found showing him expressing negative views about the Trump administration long after Vance claimed to have become an ally. In response to the publication, he led a warning of retaliation. The communications also show that Vance accurately predicted that the former president would lose the 2020 election to Joe Biden.
Ethics experts say the threat to punish Deloitte for the actions of individual employees could be a harbinger of how the second Trump administration will use its power over the federal government. he warned.
“We’ve never seen anything like this,” Kedrick Payne, senior director of ethics at the nonpartisan Election Legal Center, told The Washington Post. “It’s hard to imagine that a government contract could be in jeopardy if one of your thousands of employees said something that offended a public official.”
The newspaper did not name the person to whom Vance had personally expressed an anti-Trump message on social media, only that the recipient had shared the message with the paper.
But Trump Jr., who was instrumental in convincing his father to consider Vance as his running mate, revealed in a post to X that the correspondent was a consultant working for Deloitte. He suggested that the company’s contract with the U.S. government should be terminated.
“Deloitte executives… decided to interfere in the election and leak private conversations with J.D. Vance to help Kamala Harris,” the former president’s son said.
“Deloitte also gets $2 billion in government contracts. Maybe it’s time for Republicans to end Deloitte’s taxpayer-funded gravy train?”
Trump Jr. tagged Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson in the message and attached screenshots of Deloitte’s government contracts and employee company profiles.
The post has been viewed more than 2 million times, retweeted 13,000 times, circulated by Vance’s spokesperson William Martin, and followed by the right-wing news site Breitbart. The site named the Deloitte employee in question and published an article highlighting his work.
Jason Miller, an adviser to Donald Trump Sr., responded to the post, writing that the employee was “FAFO” (short for “Fucked Up and Found Out”).
Trump Jr. followed up his Sept. 27 post with another two days later, saying, “We have not forgotten this.” Republican Sen. Eric Schmidt of Montana echoed similar sentiments, calling the incident “outrageous” and demanding that Deloitte “respond immediately and publicly to this scandal.”
In a statement to the Washington Post, Trump Jr. justified his comments about the company’s government contracts, saying that employees “have the right to leak communications, and the Washington Post has the right to print communications.” , and…I have the right to express my opinion about the content of the communication.” My taxes are going away. ”
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Mr. Vance’s message, investigated by the newspaper, was reportedly triggered by an essay written by a Deloitte employee about the relationship between Catholicism and politics, and it is said that Mr. also reveals a much more negative view. .
In February 2020, he wrote: “Trump has completely failed to realize his economic populism (other than his disjointed China policy).”
In June 2020, Vance wrote in his predictions for that year’s election results, “I think Trump will probably lose,” but later falsely claimed that his predictions had been stolen by Democrats, echoing the former president’s statements. .
Vance has previously acknowledged that he was a former critic of Trump, labeling him “cultural heroin” and “America’s Hitler” before and after his 2016 election victory. But Vance claims he was fascinated by Trump’s performance as president.
