September 22, 2025 01:25 PM UTC

Busted On The Take, And Don't Call Tom Homan Safe Yet

•  
• by: Colorado Pols

Over the weekend, MSNBC broke the latest problematic news for the “most transparent administration in American history”–a story that in any other administration would have ended in federal bribery charges, but because border czar Tom Homan is tight with Donald Trump, no such legal oversight apparently applies:

The federal investigation was launched in western Texas in the summer of 2024 after a subject in a separate investigation claimed Homan was soliciting payments in exchange for awarding contracts should Trump win the presidential election, according to an internal Justice Department summary of the probe reviewed by MSNBC and people familiar with the case…

Undercover FBI agents posing as contractors communicated and met several times last summer with a business colleague who introduced them to Homan, and with Homan himself, who indicated he would facilitate securing contracts for them in exchange for money once he was in office, according to documents and the people familiar with the case.

On Sept. 20, 2024, with hidden cameras recording the scene at a meeting spot in Texas, Homan accepted $50,000 in bills, according to an internal summary of the case and sources.

FBI agents and Justice Department prosecutors took no further investigative steps in the final months of 2024, the people said, and expected to keep monitoring Homan to determine if he landed an official role and would make good on steering contracts in a future Trump administration…

But as Reuters reports, once Trump’s cronies took over the Justice Department, what was once a pretty straightforward bribery investigation became “persecution” by the so-called Deep State:

The statement from Patel and Blanche said the probe was a “blatantly political investigation” and “yet another example of how the Biden Department of Justice was using its resources to target President Trump’s allies.”

…In the recorded sting operation, Homan claimed he would keep the bribe money in a trust until he had completed his service in the Trump administration, one of the sources said.

Not long after the meeting when he criticized the Homan probe, Bove separately ordered corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams to be dropped, prompting career prosecutors to resign. The Justice Department has also largely dismantled the unit that prosecutes corruption cases, which took part in the Homan probe.

If Trump had lost the election, the bribery case against Homan might have become more complicated since he would not have been in a position to make good on the quid pro quo. That’s part of the reason why prosecutors decided to wait to see what Homan actually did as a Trump administration official…

And also, we can all be honest about this now, they waited to see whether Trump would allow the investigation of a friend to move forward–even a friend caught red-handed taking $50,000 in a sting operation. Back in the mid-aughts, a Democratic congressman from Louisiana was caught with thousands in bribe money stashed in his freezer, a case Republicans howled about for years until former Rep. William Jefferson was convicted in 2009–a case former President Barack Obama could have directed the Justice Department to close, and Republicans would have lost their minds if he had.

But even though the Trump administration is standing by Tom Homan today, if this case continues to cause headaches for the President, Homan could find himself on the losing end of a Department of Homeland Security power play. As the Daily Beast reported separately but very much apropos:

[Homeland Security Secretary Kristi] Noem reportedly became enraged with the border czar after he appeared on TV to discuss developments in the Trump administration’s nationwide immigration crackdown, accusing him of having “gotten out front” of her on the topic.

“She tried to put a comms blackout on him,” another member of the administration told New York. “She ordered that he not go on TV; she ordered that basically no one go on TV in the entire Homeland Lane.”

Noem didn’t stop there, telling Homan he worked for her, to which Homan responded by telling her that in fact, he works for the White House, according to the magazine.

The lesson to draw from Trump’s history of crisis management is that he sticks with loyal subordinates much longer than he usually should, to the extent of damaging his own brand along with theirs–but there are limits, as former National Security Advisor Mike Waltz discovered after his embarrassment in the “SignalGate” scandal became too much even for Trump to bear. In the meantime, everyone who ever sang Homan’s praises, including Colorado Republican members of Congress like Rep. Gabe Evans who enthusiastically signed on to Homan and Trump’s immigration crackdown, get to answer the hard questions about Tom Homan allegedly taking tens of thousands in bribe money.

“As a former police officer,” Gabe Evans likes to begin, this should stink to high heaven.