Trump allies threaten Deloitte contracts after employees leak Vance comments | Donald Trump

Supporters of Donald Trump have threatened consulting firm Deloitte with losing lucrative government contracts if he returns to the White House after November's election because one of their employees leaked critical comments about his running mate JD Vance's presidential performance.

The Republican candidate's eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., warned of retaliation after The Washington Post published correspondence in which Vance expressed negative views of the Trump administration, long after he claimed he had become a supporter. The correspondence also revealed that Vance predicted – accurately – that the former president would lose the 2020 election to Joe Biden.

Ethics experts seized on threats to punish Deloitte for the actions of a single employee, warning that it could 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, senior ethics director at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, told The Washington Post. “You cannot imagine that government contracts would be at risk if one of thousands of employees made a statement that insulted a public official.”

The Post did not name the person to whom Vance privately expressed the anti-Trump messages on social media, only reporting that the recipient shared them with the newspaper.

In a post on He suggested terminating the company's contracts with the US government.

“An executive at @Deloitte … decided to interfere in the election and leak private conversations with JD Vance to help Kamala Harris,” the former president's son said.

“Deloitte also wins $2 billion in government contracts. Maybe it’s time for Republicans to stop Deloitte’s taxpayer-funded gravy train?”

Trump Jr. tagged Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson in his message and included a screenshot of Deloitte's contracts with the government and the employee's company profile.

The post, which has been viewed more than two million times and retweeted 13,000 times, was shared by Vance's spokesman William Martin and followed up by the right-wing news site Breitbart. An article was published on the website with the name of the Deloitte employee in question, focusing on his job.

Jason Miller, an adviser to Donald Trump Sr., responded to the post by writing that the employee was “FAFO,” short for “fuck around and find out.”

Trump Jr. followed up his original Sept. 27 post with another two days later, saying, “We won't forget this.” This was shared by Eric Schmitt, a Republican senator for Missouri, who called the matter “outrageous.” called on Deloitte to “respond immediately and publicly to this scandal”.

Trump Jr. justified his comments about the company's government contract in a statement to the Washington Post, saying the employee “had the right to leak the communications, the Washington Post had the right to print them and … I have the right.” To express my opinion on where my tax dollars go.

Vance's messages examined by the Post – reportedly sparked by an essay the Deloitte employee wrote about the relationship between Catholicism and politics – reveal a far more negative view of Trump's presidency as it neared the end of its term he had previously admitted.

In February 2020, he wrote: “Trump has completely failed to implement his economic populism (with the exception of an incoherent China policy).”

“I think Trump will probably lose,” Vance wrote in June 2020 in a prediction about the outcome of that year’s election that he then falsely claimed Democrats had stolen, echoing the former president.

Vance has previously admitted to being a former critic of Trump, whom he described as “cultural heroin” and “America's Hitler” around the time of his 2016 election victory. But Vance maintains he was won over by Trump's performance as president.