White House denies Homan took bag of cash in FBI inquiry

By DEVLIN BARRETT

A White House spokesperson denied earlier this weekw that the president’s border czar, Tom Homan, accepted a bag with $50,000 in cash as part of an undercover FBI investigation last September, contradicting news reports about the case.

FBI agents working undercover made an audio recording of the September 2024 meeting in which Homan accepted the money in a bag from the fast-food chain Cava, The New York Times reported Saturday.

In the recording, he appeared to agree to try to help the agents posing as businessmen get lucrative federal contracts related to border security in a possible second Trump administration, according to people who requested anonymity to describe details of the case.

The investigation was closed by the Trump Justice Department this year, frustrating some of the people who worked on it, these people said.

Asked by reporters what happened to the money Homan received, White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt on Monday rejected the published accounts and said President Donald Trump remained fully supportive of his border czar.

“Mr. Homan never took the $50,000 that you’re referring to,” Leavitt said. “This was another example of the weaponization of the Biden Department of Justice against one of President Trump’s strongest and most vocal supporters in the midst of a presidential campaign.”

She said the FBI agents had gone undercover to “entrap one of the president’s top allies and supporters, someone who they knew very well would be taking a government position months later.”

The president and his staff “stand by Tom Homan 100%, because he did absolutely nothing wrong, and he is a brave public servant,” Leavitt said.

The Times reported Saturday that senior Justice Department officials, including Emil Bove III, had expressed skepticism about the case as early as February. One person familiar with the case said the evidence gathered had not met all the necessary elements of relevant federal crimes, such as bribery or conspiracy, while another contended that the case was prematurely ended, before such evidence could be gathered.

Homan did not respond to requests for comment over the weekend. Administration officials have said that he has not been involved with any decisions on awarding contracts.

In the first Trump administration, Homan was the acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. After leaving government in 2018, he was a paid contributor on Fox News and emerged as a vocal critic of the Biden administration’s policies. He also founded an organization called the Border911 Foundation, whose mission was “to educate Americans on what it means to have a secure, well-managed border — and why it matters.”

Homan also opened a consulting business that has worked for companies seeking immigration-related contracts, including those poised to benefit from Trump’s policies. At one point, he was paid $100,000 to $150,000 to lobby in Texas for Fisher Industries, a construction firm that last year secured a $225 million contract with the state to build a section of border wall.

Homan made it clear that he hoped to rejoin Trump in government. “I promised President Trump when he announced that if he goes back, I go back,” he wrote on social media in November 2023. “And I’m going to run the biggest deportation operation this country’s ever seen.”

He was drawn into the FBI case after a target of the investigation suggested in 2023, on his own initiative, that a $1 million payment to Homan could lead to lucrative federal contracts for border security work, according to the people familiar with the investigation.

After Trump won reelection in November, law enforcement officials notified his incoming administration about the case as the president-elect’s team considered candidates for government jobs, the people familiar with the case said.