The Border Czar and a Bag of $50,000

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From the New York Times, I'm Natalie Kitrowev.

This is the Daily.

The White House Border Czar Tom Holman was recorded on an FBI surveillance tape in September 2024, accepting $50,000 in cash.

Did he keep that money or give it back?

For the past few weeks, Trump officials have been asked repeatedly about an undercover FBI investigation of Border Czar Tom Holman.

What became of the $50,000 in cash that the FBI delivered to Mr.

Holman?

And consistently, they've sidestepped.

Did he accept that $50,000 or not?

George, I don't know what you're talking about.

Did he accept $50,000 for what?

Or refused to answer key questions.

Did the FBI get it back?

Senator Whitehouse, you're welcome to talk to the FBI about whether one of Trump's top immigration officials brazenly broke the law and what's being done about it.

The White House and the president stand by Tom Homan 100%

because he did absolutely nothing wrong and he is a today.

My colleague Devlin Barrett on the story behind those questions and why the Tom Homan scandal hasn't faded away.

It's Wednesday, October 15th.

Devlin, I've been watching this story of these allegations surrounding Tom Homan unfold over the past several weeks.

And as I've watched, I keep thinking about this interview I did with Homan on the show in June.

One thing that really stuck with me from that interview was just how uncompromising Homan was in the way he presented his view of the law and what should happen to people who break it, that they should be punished.

And I want to just play you a little bit of tape about how he represented himself and that mission.

We're names from laws, right?

We got enforceable laws.

Entering this country league is a crime.

We don't pick and choose what we enforce.

We're here to enforce the law.

And then recently, we got some new information about Holman.

Tell us when you first learned about this story.

So I cover the Justice Department and the FBI.

And months ago, I had started hearing rumblings that there had been some kind of bribery investigation related to Tom Homan.

But I couldn't quite figure out what it was about or where it was.

And for a while, it just was a puzzle I couldn't solve.

You had a lot of other stories you were covering.

It's pretty busy at the DOJ and the FBI most days.

Then sometime in September, I got a little more information where someone knew some of the answers to these questions

and

said, you know, oh, you mean the case with a bag of cash?

Whoa, bag of cash.

It's a, that's a pretty big tip.

Well, right.

That's not, you know, what you would think of as like, let's call it regular business practice, right?

It's almost the stereotypical way that people think of corruption cases.

Yeah.

So from that point, I started putting more pieces together and figuring more things out.

I wasn't the only reporter chasing.

this.

MSNBC also figured it out.

And so what I eventually came to understand was that there had been, beginning really in 2023, but stretching all the way into this year, a really fascinating investigation that came to include Tom Homan.

As it's been described to me by sources, if you go back to the spring of 2023, the FBI in Texas was conducting an undercover investigation related to a particular businessman.

And the investigation, my sources were adamant, was not looking at Tom Holman at all.

But in the course of that investigation, that businessman told the undercover agents

that if those agents who were posing as businessmen looking for government contracts, if they were willing to pay Tom Holman a million dollars, he could steer government contracts to them.

So these agents weren't initially fishing for anything related to Tom Homan.

They weren't looking at him at that time.

My sources are adamant that no one had asked about Tom Holman.

That was brought up unprompted, and Tom Holman just sort of wanders into the picture, wanders into the frame of what the FBI agents are already doing.

Wow.

Just to put us in time here, we're in 2023.

We know Tom Holman as the former ICE director in the first Trump administration, this longtime border official.

He actually served in the Obama administration, but he's not in government at this point, right?

Aaron Powell, right.

He's just a private citizen, and he runs a consulting business for companies that are seeking contracts.

So it's not completely out of the blue that he would have some interest in government contracts.

But again, he's not in government at that time, and he's known mostly as a former Trump official who is what they sometimes call a campaign surrogate.

He often would appear, you know, speaking publicly in support of another Trump administration.

And there's a lot of general expectation that if Trump wins reelection, Homan will rejoin the government.

And in November of 2023, he out and out says it.

He says, you know, I promise President Trump that if he goes back, I go back.

And then he added to that,

and I'm going to run the biggest deportation operation this country's ever seen.

Right.

He's widely seen as a likely member of a future Trump administration.

He's saying he's going to be there.

And there's this sense that a lot of money is going to be thrown at the area that he's going to be involved in in border enforcement.

Well, right.

That whole time period, the Trump campaign is talking about deporting millions of people.

It is a very expensive prospect.

So there's a natural expectation that there will be significant government contracts related to both border security work and deportation work.

Okay.

So back to the investigation.

What happens next?

So, once that businessman just sort of proposes this notion that the undercover agents could pay Tom Homan to get government contracts, a series of conversations follow.

This investigation goes on for a long time, but eventually a meeting is set up for September 20th, 2024.

And at that meeting, my sources tell me the undercover agents bring $50,000 in cash, and that cash is put in a takeout food bag, a bag from the chain Kava.

So what has been described to me is at that meeting, Homan both accepts the cash and seems to convey that he's willing to help them get contracts in the future.

Do we know exactly what he says, Devlin?

Do we have any specific information about that?

We don't know exactly what he says, and that's obviously a big question in this whole process.

But we do know that the FBI agents made an audio recording of the meeting.

So somewhere in government files, there exists, I am told, an audio recording of this discussion.

And what's been described to me is that Homan accepts the cash and leaves.

And that's a great start to an investigation.

You've got a lot to work with there, right?

Because the person you're investigating has taken the money and appears to have agreed to do things in exchange for the money.

But that's not really the end of the investigation.

Why not?

For a couple of reasons.

One, because there was no very specific act that he agreed to do in exchange for that money.

And two, it's important to remember, at the time he takes the money, Tom Homan is still not a government official.

He certainly can't make the Biden administration, which was running the government at that that time, award contracts.

So in the moment the cash is handed over, Homan really can't deliver even if he wants to.

Right.

I guess the assumption here is that this is like a down payment for future services that he could potentially render, correct?

Right.

The investigators thought of it as this is the start of the relationship.

This is the start of the process.

Devling, does that help explain a question I've had about all this, which is $50,000 is a lot of money, but it also doesn't feel like enough for someone like Homan to do something this risky that could really jeopardize his career.

Right.

It wasn't necessarily that you give him this $50,000 and then he immediately starts doing things for you.

One source described it as, you know, they paid money to make a friend.

And in a regular corruption investigation, there would naturally be follow-up meetings, maybe follow-up payments.

That's certainly a possibility in such an investigation.

Right.

They're playing the long game here.

Exactly.

They have a very strong start to a case.

They have very good evidence, and they have a very good basis to proceed with their investigation.

And then Trump wins the election.

Right.

And within days of Trump winning the election, the president-elect announces that Tom Homan will become his border czar.

And not many people know the ins and outs of these czar positions that government and White Houses sometimes announce.

Yeah, I've always wondered, is that a real long-term position in the U.S.

government, czar?

Aaron Powell, it's not something you're nominated for.

It's not something that the Senate confirms you for.

It's very much sort of a point person for an administration on a particular subject.

But what matters in this instance is that because there's no Senate confirmation, there's not the same kind of background check scrubbing that goes on for a czar position as there is for a cabinet official or a deputy cabinet official.

And that's important in Homan's situation because there is this underlying outstanding case.

Aaron Powell, are you saying basically that this might have been intentional, that the Trump administration might have nominated Homan to the czar position in order to avoid a background check?

It's really unclear.

But we do know, however, that during the transition, after Trump is elected, but before he is sworn into office, federal law enforcement officials notify and essentially warn the incoming administration that this investigation exists into Tom Holman.

And the Trump Justice Department then does inherit this investigation.

Walk us through what they do with it.

The short answer is: they don't do much of anything with it.

The senior officials of that administration look at the case and

they don't like it.

They're very skeptical that this is anything worth pursuing.

And this case that the agents and investigators thought was a very solid case, a very promising start, it just gets closed.

We'll be right back.

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So Devlin, once this story breaks about the investigation and about the ending of the investigation, what happens?

How does the Trump administration respond?

Do they explain their decision to drop this case?

So when we asked the Justice Department to explain, you know, why was this case closed, the FBI director, Cash Patel, and the Deputy Attorney General, Todd Blanch said that it was reviewed by agents and prosecutors, and they said those agents and prosecutors found no credible evidence of any criminal wrongdoing.

They basically called it a baseless investigation, and that's why they say they closed it.

They don't mention the bag of cash specifically?

They don't mention the bag of cash, and that becomes a real focal point of all the questions that follow about what the administration did here and why they did it.

One of the first very public comments about all this is the White House press secretary, Carolyn Levitt.

Does Holman have to return the $50,000?

Well, Mr.

Holman never took the $50,000 that you're referring to, so you should get your facts straight, number one.

Denying that he took the money at all.

Hours after that.

Tom, I want to give you a chance to address this article that came out over the weekend.

Tom Holman goes on Fox News and he's given an opportunity to just respond to the reporting, respond to these allegations.

And his answer is very telling in one way, in that he never denies taking the money.

Sorry, look, I did nothing criminal.

I did nothing illegal.

And there's hit piece after hit piece after hit piece.

He repeats very emphatically that he didn't commit any crime.

And I'm glad the FBI and DOJ came out and said, and you know, said that nothing illegal happened, nothing, you know, no criminal activity.

You're talking about guys being.

Yeah, suddenly we're talking not about whether this happened or not, but about whether it was legal.

And obviously, those two things are very different.

Right.

And so the administration ends up getting very adamant about the point that Homan makes in his interview on this, which is just to say there was no crime here.

And that becomes a kind of mantra throughout the administration as the questions keep coming up.

Do you know sitting here with the...

All I know is that Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Patel said there was no case.

And Caroline.

Last week, there's a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee in which Attorney General Pam Bondi is very confrontational.

Was she afraid of that?

If you worked for me, you would have been fired.

She is adamant that no crime was committed, and she basically goes on the attack and just criticizes the lawmakers who are even asking the question.

In the same vein, just this past weekend, the vice president J.D.

Vance, is interviewed by ABC's George Stephanopoulos, and he's asked again about Tom Homan and the bag of cash.

Are you saying that he did not accept the $50,000?

Vance's answer is very similar to Bondi's.

The question is: did he do something illegal?

And there's absolutely no evidence that Tom Homan has ever taken a tribe,

which is why he's working in the administration.

He insists no crime was committed and, again, goes on the attack for even asking the question.

Of course, this administration dropped the investigation before they could actually prove whether or not a crime was being committed.

So, Devlin, what do you make of their argument?

So, on a political level, their argument is very simple.

This was a partisan witch hunt generated by the last Democratic administration.

The legal argument is actually a little more complicated, and it touches on a lot of things.

First, I would just say, not everyone inside the Justice Department has the exact same view about this case.

I have talked to people who feel very strongly that it was a very strong case, a chargeable case, a pursuable case, and it's frustrating to those people that the case was dropped.

I have talked to other people inside the department who have made the argument, look, this was a great beginning of a case.

We had not finished the case, and it's not a terrific case without more evidence.

So there aren't universal views about this, even inside the department.

But it also, this case speaks to what's really a long-running disagreement about whether or not the Justice Department is overusing and stretching corruption laws beyond what they were intended to do.

And over a number of years, the Supreme Court has basically whittled away at how federal corruption laws can be used and has repeatedly sent a signal to the Justice Department that certainly the conservatives on the court believe that the Justice Department is, in many cases, misusing or overusing corruption statutes to go after politicians.

Aaron Powell, meaning there's a disagreement within the legal community about what actually constitutes corruption, or at least what's the threshold for proving it in court.

Aaron Ross Powell, well, exactly.

And one of the ways that this case gets argued about among lawyers is there's something called stream of benefits corruption, which makes the argument that you don't need a very explicit quid pro quo.

You don't need a very explicit, you give me X dollars and I will do Y for you.

Soprano style.

Right.

That what you can have is a sort of corrupt flow relationship where I do the following things for you, like cash, and you in exchange do the following things for me, like official favors, like getting contracts, but the court has to believe that it's explicit.

It can't just be a vague set of actions.

That's the argument for how you could charge a case like this.

So there are obviously a lot of open legal questions here, and maybe what the FBI had in its hands wasn't an open open and shut case yet.

But Holman taking this money as a lawman, as the chief spokesman of this administration's immigration policy, it does raise all sorts of questions.

And the administration not following up also raises questions.

I guess what I'm wondering, Devlin, is there's been so many similar scandals swirling around the Trump administration at this point, allegations of corruption, from crypto to the free airplane.

A lot of those have kind of faded away in the fire hose of news that we are all experiencing on a day-to-day basis.

But this one has kind of outlived the Trump news cycle.

Why?

I mean, look, as someone who covers the Justice Department and the FBI, I will tell you that there are many corruption cases that are hard to follow, hard to explain, hard to just unravel and unpack.

Crypto isn't an easy thing to explain.

Sure.

You know what is easy to explain?

I have a bag full of cash.

That's pretty simple.

Why did he take a bag of cash?

What did he do with the cash?

And in addition to how simple a bag of cash is, we know from the reporting that an audio tape exists somewhere.

Trevor Burrus: Right.

And that tape could be released.

People could start demanding its release.

Right.

So if you think for a minute about the Jeffrey Epstein case, obviously the Tom Homan case is not the Jeffrey Jeffrey Epstein case.

Epstein is a completely different type of case with a completely different history.

But the demand to release the Tom Homan tape is in some ways very similar to the demands to release the Epstein files because it's a simple, straightforward question.

And it's sort of when you are told no, it begs the question, well, why is the answer no?

Can I just ask, do we know what happened to the money, the 50,000?

We really don't.

A lot of what you've seen since the initial reporting is people trying to figure out the answer to that question, but the administration really won't tell us, and Homan so far hasn't told us.

So the case may be dead, but I think what hasn't died is people's desire to know the answer to that question.

So I think for the foreseeable future, wherever Tom Homan goes, he's going to be asked that question.

What did you do with the money?

Well, Devlin, thanks so much for coming on the show.

Thanks for having me.

We'll be right back.

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Here's what else you should know today.

On Tuesday, President Trump announced that the U.S.

had killed six men aboard a boat off the coast of Venezuela, the fifth known strike on a boat in the Caribbean Sea since September.

He said the men had been transporting drugs, but provided no evidence to support that claim.

And while he posted a video of the attack, the president offered no details about the nationality of the suspects and didn't identify them as belonging to any particular criminal group.

The U.S.

military has now killed 27 people in these boat attacks, treating them as if they were enemy soldiers in the middle of a war zone rather than criminal suspects.

And it's a great honor to have the leader of Argentina, a place that I love, I've been to, and one of the most beautiful places in the world, President, I really want to thank you very much.

Trump hosted Argentinian President Javier Malay at the White House on Tuesday, just days after the U.S.

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We think he's going to win.

He should win.

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Trump explicitly tied U.S.

economic support for the country to the political fortunes of Malay, who's trying to stave off a financial meltdown at home and whose party is facing tough midterm elections this month.

Trump acknowledged that the bailout was intended to support the Argentinian leaders' fiscally conservative policies and wouldn't make a big difference for the U.S.

Today's episode was produced by Caitlin O'Keefe and Carlos Puerto.

It was edited by Liz O'Balin and Michael Benoit and contains original music by Marion Lozano, Will Reed, and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley.

That's it for the daily.

I'm Natalie Ketroeff.

See you tomorrow.

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