US senator J.D. Vance, an Ohio Republican and former US president Donald Trump’s pick for vice president, has a public Venmo account that gives an unfiltered glimpse into his extensive network of connections with establishment GOP heavyweights, wealthy financiers, technology executives, the prestige press, and fellow graduates of Yale Law School—precisely the elites he rails against. A WIRED analysis of the account, the people listed as Vance’s friends, and, in turn, the people listed as their friends highlights sometimes bizarre and surprising connections. Experts, meanwhile, worry that the information revealed by the peer-to-peer payment app raises the potential for stalking, trolling, and impersonation.
More than 200 people appear on Vance’s Venmo “friends” list. Among them is Amalia Halikias, government relations director at the Heritage Foundation—the conservative think tank coordinating the controversial Project 2025. So is an assistant US attorney for the Southern District of New York, among many other lawyers for the Department of Justice, frequently decried by Trump loyalists as enemies and part of the “deep state.” So are Jeff Flake, the famously anti-Trump former Arizona senator and current ambassador to Turkey; lobbyists from organizations like the Government Strategies Group; people affiliated with other conservative think tanks like the Hoover Institution and the American Enterprise Institute; journalists and media personalities like Bari Weiss and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson; and tech executives from Anthropic and AOL. (None of these people responded to requests for comment.)
Lanny Davis, a well-known political operative and former lawyer for Trump antagonist Michael Cohen, is among those who denied being Venmo friends with Vance despite seemingly appearing in Vance’s contacts. (The account in question, which Davis declined to confirm or deny was his, was also linked to someone named Michael Cohen.) This points to one important caveat—being friends on Venmo does not mean two people have transacted together, or even know the payment app has designated them as friends.
According to Venmo, when someone first uses the app, they are prompted to allow it to access their phone contacts. If they agree, Venmo will find any contacts already using the app and automatically populate the user’s friend list. Users can also intentionally add or remove friends. Along with the user’s transactions, their friends list is public by default. This means it’s likely that Vance’s list of friends was largely populated by the contacts in his phone when he set up his account in December of 2016.
Vance’s Venmo account was first discovered by a law enforcement and extremism researcher who asked to remain anonymous, citing security concerns. WIRED verified the senator’s account through its connections to his wife, Usha Vance, as well as actors or producers in the 2020 film adaptation of his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. In total, Vance is connected directly to 211 people.
On Monday, Trump officially named Vance as his pick for vice president, reflecting the prominence of the party’s growing populist wing. Vance has frequently positioned himself as anti-elite, writing in Hillbilly Elegy: “Sometimes I view members of the elite with an almost primal scorn.” In an April post on X, Vance, who graduated Yale Law School in 2013, condemned “elite universities,” calling them “expensive day care centers for coddled children.” His network is largely made up of attorneys, the vast majority of whom received their law degrees from Yale Law around the same time he did.
Despite his anti-elite stance, Vance’s connections reveal a more complex relationship with establishment figures. At the same time, as the former president distances himself from Project 2025—a right-wing policy roadmap aiming to purge the federal government and reshape the executive branch and turn the US into what critics characterize as a Christian nationalist autocratic state—Vance’s Venmo network reveals his ties not just to Halikias but to others associated with a maximalist interpretation of MAGA. Gladden Pappin, for instance—president of the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs and a figure with close ties to the intellectual wing of the far right—shows up as one of Vance’s friends.
Senator Vance’s office declined to comment on the record for this story. In an interview with Newsmax earlier this month, he said that the Project 2025 document has good ideas in it, as well as things he disagrees with. Vance did not elaborate on what exactly those good or bad ideas are. At the time of publication, Vance’s Venmo account remains fully public.
Vance’s friends have an average of 277 friends each. This wider network of associates shows an extended web of accounts who share names with high-profile political figures like Cohen, Nick Ayers, Todd Ricketts, and Michael Flynn Jr., as well as far-right activists like Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe, Laura Loomer, and Ali Alexander.
“What you guys need to realize is that Vance is influenceable,” wrote Andrew Torba on X. Torba is the founder of Gab, a social network popular with conspiracy theorists and Christian nationalists. He has long promoted antisemitic content on his social media accounts. “We have plenty of people in his orbit. Plenty of our guys can be put into positions of power because he’s there.”
“This appears to be his actual personal contacts,” says Jordan Libowitz, the vice president of communications for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW. He notes that the data found on Venmo is much more personal than what campaigns typically share through official channels, warning that “the more personal data that is public about someone the more points of pressure or influence there are on that person.”
Few of Vance’s transactions are public, and those that are seem mundane, like a payment to a staff member for doughnuts in January. WIRED also uncovered the Venmo account of his former Senate campaign manager, Jordan Wiggins, which shows a more extensive and occasionally eyebrow-raising transaction history, including more than 50 payments from as early as 2015, some labeled for things like “Back waxing & Happy Ending,” and “adult 🎥”. While these descriptions are likely jokes between friends, Wiggins didn’t respond to a request for comment.
After WIRED reached out to Vance’s Senate office on Wednesday, Wiggins made his account transactions private.
Experts say that the visibility of Vance’s account could create problems for the high-profile individuals connected to it. “Access to anyone’s social connections can reveal sensitive private information and expose them to security risks,” Jennifer Lynch, general counsel at civil liberties nonprofit the Electronic Frontier Foundation, tells WIRED. High-profile politicians like Vance, Lynch argues, may be especially prone to social engineering attacks and impersonation. “If someone who is a candidate for vice president hasn’t changed his privacy settings, I don’t know how a company can expect the rest of us to stay on top of this.”
This is far from the first time a government official’s Venmo account and list of friends has been discovered by the public. In 2017, the account of Sean Spicer, a former press secretary to Trump, was sent scores of joke payments through the app. In 2021 the Daily Beast reported that US representative Matt Gaetz had used Venmo to send payments to a person who was later convicted of sex trafficking a minor. (Gaetz, WIRED found, is friends with at least five people in Vance’s contact list.)
Last year, the Guardian reported that several lawyers, including one who successfully challenged race-conscious admissions at universities, used Venmo to pay a top aide to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. (The payments appeared to be related to a holiday party.)
Privacy advocates at the EFF have long criticized Venmo for its permissive privacy settings and the associated risks. It wasn’t until reporters at BuzzFeed News found president Joe Biden and his family members on the app in 2021 that Paypal, the company that owns Venmo, allowed users to make their friends lists private. Even now, this option is not the default setting and must be manually adjusted.
In a statement, Venmo spokesperson Caitlin Girouard tells WIRED that “Venmo takes our customers’ privacy very seriously, which is why we let customers choose their privacy settings—and we make it incredibly simple for customers to make their account private if they choose to do so.”
In spite of the attention Venmo’s privacy shortcomings have garnered, it seems like many haven’t gotten that message. WIRED easily identified other high-profile individuals through Venmo, such as former NSA director and Open AI board member Paul Nakasone.
