It’s been a few days since the public learned about the bribery controversy surrounding White House border czar Tom Homan, and this clearly has not escaped the attention of congressional Democrats. The New York Times reported that members from both chambers have already opened separate investigations into the matter. From the article:
In a letter on Monday, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee demanded that Attorney General Pam Bondi and Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, provide ‘all recordings from Mr. Homan’s meeting,’ all of their investigative material and any communications between the White House and their agencies over the case.
“Your reported effort to shut down this investigation appears to be a brazen cover-up to protect Donald Trump’s allies, at a time when the D.O.J. and F.B.I. are also being ordered to aggressively pursue prosecution of Donald Trump’s political enemies,” the Democrats wrote in the letter, which was led by Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the committee.
Around the same time, two Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee — Illinois’ Dick Durbin and California’s Adam Schiff — sent letters to the FBI and DOJ, asking that “recordings of Mr. Homan receiving cash from undercover FBI agents” be turned over.
The senators, joined by five other Senate Democrats, added that they’re “initiating a robust oversight inquiry.”
For those just joining us, about a year ago, undercover FBI agents recorded Homan allegedly accepting $50,000 in cash after indicating he could help the agents (who were posing as businessmen) win government contracts in a second Trump administration.
The matter was under investigation, right up until Trump returned to the White House, at which point the probe stalled. Earlier this month, the case was closed altogether.
Broadly speaking, the Democratic investigations are focused on two separate but related questions. The first is why the investigation into Homan ended so abruptly and the degree to which politics was possibly involved in derailing the probe.
But the other question is about the alleged bribe itself.
Homan sat down with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham on Monday night, and the host offered him an opportunity to deny the underlying allegations. The White House official insisted that he “did nothing illegal,” but it was hard not to notice that he carefully avoided the underlying question about whether he accepted $50,000 in cash in a Cava bag from undercover FBI agents.
Complicating matters, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted that Homan “never took the $50,000” — a new defense that Team Trump did not offer when initially responding to questions over the weekend — despite everything we now know about the case. It’d be easy enough to resolve the matter — the Trump administration could simply release the FBI recording — but the folks who claim to be the “most transparent” officials in the history of the planet have so far kept the tapes under wraps. What’s more, it’s unclear whether, and to what degree, Team Trump will cooperate with Democratic investigations. (Democrats are in the minority, so they lack subpoena power that would compel disclosures.) As regular readers know, “Release the Epstein files” has been a common mantra for quite a while. “Release the Homan tapes” is just getting started. Watch this space. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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