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 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. 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.” After Trump was elected a second time in 2024, amid questions about Homan’s financial relationships with 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 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.” “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.”
Ken Dilanian is the justice and intelligence correspondent for MS NOW.
Carol Leonnig is a senior investigative reporter with MS NOW. Recommended
