The Trump Justice Department Shuts Down the FBI Case Investigating Border Czar Tom Homan for Accepting Cash Bribes

Sep 20, 2025

Surprising absolutely no one, Trump administration “border czar” Tom Homan was recorded last September on camera by undercover FBI agents accepting a cash bribe in return for future favors. Also surprising no one, the investigation was quashed by the same Trump officials who killed the corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams in exchange for cooperation on the administration’s draconian immigration crackdown.

MSNBC has the scoop:

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.
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.

Trump has a strong stance on the issue of corruption: He is for it. Nearly the first thing he did in office was to fire corruption watchdogs, gut the Office of Government Ethics, and suspend enforcement of a law against bribing foreign governments.

Given this background, it’s important to remember that this is the one case of blatant, cash-in-a-paper-bag corruption that we know about. But with federal anti-corruption watchdogs totally gutted, who knows how many more such cases are happening even as we speak.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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