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TOM HOMAN TOOK $50K FROM UNDERCOVER FBI AGENTS. TRUMP’S DOJ SHUT
DOWN THE INVESTIGATION.  
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Carol Leonnig and Ken Dilanian
September 20, 2025
MSNBC
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_ On Sept. 20, 2024, with hidden cameras recording the scene, Homan
accepted $50,000 in bills from undercover FBI agents, according to an
internal summary of the case and sources. Trump's FBI and Justice
officials closed down the investigation. _

"Thomas Homan", by Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA 2.0)

 

In an undercover operation last year, the FBI recorded Tom Homan, now
the White House border czar, accepting $50,000 in cash after
indicating he could help the agents — who were posing as business
executives — win government contracts in a second Trump
administration, according to multiple people familiar with the probe
and internal documents reviewed by MSNBC.

The FBI and the Justice Department planned to wait to see whether
Homan would deliver on his alleged promise once he became the
nation’s top immigration official. But the case indefinitely stalled
soon after Donald Trump became president again in January, according
to six sources familiar with the matter. In recent weeks, Trump
appointees officially closed the investigation, after FBI Director
Kash Patel requested a status update on the case, two of the people
said.

It’s unclear what reasons FBI and Justice Department officials gave
for shutting down the investigation. But a Trump Justice Department
appointee called the case a “deep state” probe in early 2025 and
no further investigative steps were taken, the sources say.

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.

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. The U.S. Attorney’s office in the Western District of
Texas, working with the FBI, asked the Justice Department’s Public
Integrity Section to join its ongoing probe “into the Border Czar
and former Acting Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Tom
Homan and others based on evidence of payment from FBI undercover
agents in exchange for facilitating future contracts related to border
enforcement.”

Homan, who served as acting director of Immigration and Customs
Enforcement early in Trump’s first term, openly claimed during the
2024 campaign that he would play a prominent role in carrying out
Trump’s promised mass deportations.

Asked for comment about MSNBC's exclusive reporting, the White House,
the Justice Department and the FBI dismissed the investigation as
politically motivated and baseless.

In a statement provided to MSNBC, FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy
Attorney General Todd Blanche said, “This matter originated under
the previous administration and was subjected to a full review by FBI
agents and Justice Department prosecutors. They found no credible
evidence of any criminal wrongdoing. The Department’s resources must
remain focused on real threats to the American people, not baseless
investigations. As a result, the investigation has been closed.”

White House Deputy Press Secretary Abigail Jackson slammed the probe
as a "blatantly political investigation, which found no evidence of
illegal activity, is yet another example of how the Biden Department
of Justice was using it’s resources to target President Trump’s
allies rather than investigate real criminals and the millions of
illegal aliens who flooded our country."

"Tom Homan has not been involved with any contract award decisions. He
is a career law enforcement officer and lifelong public servant who is
doing a phenomenal job on behalf of President Trump and the country,"
she added on behalf of Homan, a senior White House employee.

Homan did not reply to requests for comment.

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.

When special agents in Texas began probing the subject’s claim that
Homan was soliciting bribes, the White House border czar, 63, was
president and owner of a private consulting business that said it
could help companies in the border security industry win government
contracts. Homan often accompanied Trump on the campaign trail in 2023
and 2024, and for months before the presidential election publicly
touted that he expected to oversee implementation of Trump’s
immigration policies.

“Trump comes back in January, I’ll be on his heels coming back,
and I will run the biggest deportation operation this country’s ever
seen,” Homan said at the National Conservatism Conference
[[link removed]] in July 2024.

Several FBI and Justice officials believed that they had a strong
criminal case against Homan for conspiracy to commit bribery based on
recording him accepting cash and his apparent promise to assist with
contracts, according to four people familiar with the probe. Homan
could have been charged with a crime then, legal experts say, but his
case was unusual: He was not a public official, and Trump was not
president at the time he accepted money in the FBI’s undercover
sting, so his actions didn’t clearly fit under a standard bribery
charge.

Top officials privately debated the possible charges given Homan’s
status at the time, people familiar with the case said. But several
concluded it would be better for the investigation to continue to
monitor his actions once he was back in public office. According to a
document reviewed by MSNBC, Justice officials were eyeing four
potential criminal charges in his case: conspiracy, bribery and two
kinds of fraud.

MSNBC asked legal experts about a hypothetical situation similar to
the Homan probe. They said a person who promises to influence federal
contracts when they become a public official can’t be charged under
the federal bribery statutes until they are named or appointed to such
a post. If the person did get the administration job and then
reaffirmed his promise or communicated in some way about his plan to
deliver on his agreement, investigators could make a strong bribery
case.

It is still a crime, however, for anyone to seek money to improperly
influence federal contracts, the legal experts said, whether they are
a public official or not, and whether they ever delivered on their
promise or not. People in this category could be charged with
conspiracy or fraud, they say.

“If someone who is not yet a public official, but expects to be,
takes bribes in exchange for agreeing to take official acts after they
are appointed, they can’t be charged with bribery,” said Randall
Eliason, the former chief of public corruption prosecutions in the
U.S. Attorney’s Office in D.C. and former white-collar law
professor. “But they can be charged with conspiracy to commit
bribery. In a conspiracy charge, the crime is the agreement to commit
a criminal act in the future.”

On Nov. 11, 2024, President Trump announced he would make Homan his
border czar, a White House adviser role, which — unlike the job of
director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement — did not require
Senate confirmation or an extensive FBI background check.

Several FBI and Justice Department officials believed Homan’s
acceptance of the cash provided strong evidence that they should
continue to pursue after Homan took public office. The Public
Integrity Section, a squad of seasoned public corruption prosecutors
typically assigned to sensitive cases involving elected and other
high-profile figures, agreed to join the case in late November 2024,
according to documents reviewed by MSNBC.

Shortly after Trump’s inauguration, however, in either late January
or February 2025, former acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove was
briefed on the case and told Justice Department officials he did not
support the investigation, according to two people familiar with the
case.

Around the same time, the Public Integrity Section was battling with
Bove over his demand that they dismiss a bribery case against New York
Mayor Eric Adams. The section’s supervisors, who would resign one by
one in February rather than agree to dismiss the Adams case, had
assigned a top supervisor to help oversee the Homan case with federal
prosecutors in the Western District of Texas, where the investigation
began, two people said.

Homan had spent three decades in federal border protection and
immigration enforcement. A former police officer from upstate New
York, Homan had started work as a Border Patrol agent in the 1980s and
later was promoted to several supervisory jobs. In 2013, President
Barack Obama elevated Homan to serve as head of Immigration and
Customs Enforcement’s deportation branch.

When Trump was first elected president in 2017, he appointed Homan as
acting head of ICE. In that role, Homan pushed the controversial
“zero-tolerance” policy for immigrants seeking to cross the
border, resulting in the separation of thousands of migrant children
from their parents and family members.

Homan’s nomination to become the permanent ICE director stalled in
the Senate amid widespread criticism over the administration’s
family-separations policies and Senate Democrats’ opposition to his
confirmation. After his lengthy career in government service, Homan
announced in April 2018 he would retire.

Homan then launched his consulting firm, Homeland Strategic
Consulting. Its website boasted of its work with the departments of
Homeland Security, Defense, Justice and others: “We have a proven
track record of opening doors and bringing successful relationships to
our clients, resulting in tens of millions of dollars of federal
contracts to private companies.”

During the Biden administration, as Trump prepared to run again for
president, Homan remained close to Trump and his advisers, working as
a Fox News contributor and with the Heritage Foundation, as well as
contributing to Project 2025, the right-wing blueprint for Trump’s
second term.
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When Homan became Trump’s top border official in 2025, his
consulting work and financial ties to border security and
immigration-related contractors spurred questions from Democrats in
Congress about his potential conflicts of interest.

Many expected Homan, a trusted Trump ally, to serve if Trump were
re-elected in 2024. In a December 2023 interview on the slain
conservative activist’s eponymous podcast “The Charlie Kirk
Show,” Homan promised he’d be pushing a robust removal of
immigrants when Trump was re-elected.

“We’re going to have the biggest deportation operation this
country has ever seen,” Homan told Benny Johnson, a right-wing
commentator and host on the show. “And I’m not going apologize for
it.”

"As Border Czar, you are uniquely positioned to help your former
business client reap a huge windfall from the Trump Administration’s
spending on immigration enforcement." -- Rep. Jamie Raskin

After Trump was elected a second time in 2024, amid questions about
Homan’s financial relationships 
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clients who sought work related to the border, Homan said he had no
conflict and would take steps to prevent one. He said he was shutting
down his consulting business 
[[link removed]*:*:text=But*20he*20has*20also*20promised,their*20targets*2C*20he*20has*20said.__;I34lJSUlJSUlJSU!!PIZeeW5wscynRQ!uhEUcZQ7yL1ohUEOxuQWG4lH7ddty8I3oVGjml4ZAqDyddK4hqXaHmYhcwTy-qULR_FPqWj3Bhs-pC5odu8fLN8$]and
would remove himself from discussions of specific contracts to avoid
the appearance of a conflict of interest.

“As Border Czar, you are uniquely positioned to help your former
business client reap a huge windfall from the Trump Administration’s
spending on immigration enforcement,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking
Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, wrote in a letter last
month asking for documents and communications with another firm Homan
worked for, Geo Group, a major immigration detention contractor.
Raskin was joined by Reps. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., and Jasmine
Crockett, D-Texas, in pressing for answers about Homan’s potential
conflicts.

Asked about a hypothetical situation of a person promising help with
contracts once they get into public office, Eliason said federal law
makes it a crime to strike a corrupt agreement to help influence
government contracts and decisions, no matter the identity of the
person or whether they succeed. He said a person who is not a public
official yet but promises to exert influence improperly when they get
the job — and accepts or solicits money to do so — can be charged
with conspiracy.

Eliason pointed to the Reagan-era bribery scandal involving the
now-defunct defense contractor Wedtech. Eugene Wallach, a lawyer and
friend of Attorney General Edwin Meese III, was convicted of
conspiracy to commit crimes by taking substantial payments from
Wedtech while promising to influence contracts once he landed a
high-level Justice Department job under Meese. (A higher court later
overturned Wallach’s conviction due to a faulty jury instruction.)

“The defendant is agreeing that he will commit the crime of bribery
once he is appointed to be a public official,” Eliason added.
“That agreement itself is the conspiracy crime, and the fact that it
never actually took place is not a defense. That would be true if he
were never even appointed to anything at all.”

_Carol Leonnig
[[link removed]] is an
investigative reporter and four-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize._

_Ken Dilanian
[[link removed]] is the justice
and intelligence correspondent for MSNBC._

MSNBC [[link removed]] is a cable news channel that broadcasts
news and liberal political commentary. It is owned by NBCUniversal, a
subsidiary of Comcast, and is headquartered at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in
Manhattan, New York City. 

* Tom Homan
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* DOJ
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* FBI
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* corruption
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