At least eight times during a Tuesday hearing, Rhode Island Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse asked Attorney General Pam Bondi about what border czar Tom Homan did with the $50,000 cash bribe he received from undercover FBI agents in 2024.
Again and again, Bondi refused to answer.
“What became of the $50,000 in cash that the FBI paid to Mr. Homan, in a paper bag evidently?” the senator asked the attorney general, who slowly flipped to a page in a binder so she could quote a statement from her deputy attorney general.
“Senator,” she said, “as Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche recently stated, the investigation of Mr. Homan was subjected to a full review by the FBI agents and DOJ prosecutors. They found no credible evidence of any wrongdoing.”
Nowhere in that response was an actual answer, Whitehouse observed, so he again asked what became of the $50,000. Bondi vaguely urged the senator to “look at your facts.”
“Are you saying that they did not deliver $50,000 in cash to Mr. Homan?” Whitehouse pressed. Bondi began reciting the statement she previously attributed to Blanche, which Whitehouse noted addresses a “different question.”
He repeated his question, asking if the FBI ever got the $50,000 back. Bondi told the senator to consult the FBI.
“They report to you,” Whitehouse pointed out. “Can’t you answer this question?” Bondi said he could talk to FBI Director Kash Patel, leading Whitehouse to ask if Homan kept the money. The attorney general, chuckling, began to repeat her previous spiel verbatim.
“I can see I’m not going to get a straight answer from you to a very simple question,” Whitehouse said. Out of the blue, Bondi leveled a personal attack, accusing Whitehouse of working with “dark money groups.”
Staying on track, Whitehouse asked whether the reported investigation looked into whether Homan declared the $50,000 on his tax returns, leading Bondi to make another unrelated accusation, this time that Whitehouse “pushed for legislation that would subsidize [his] wife’s company”—an imperfect telling of allegations first made by a conservative watchdog group and amplified by people like Elon Musk.
Whitehouse pointed out the irrelevance of that claim, promising to submit the questions Bondi failed to answer as “questions for the record,” or written, formal questions Congress provides witnesses after a hearing for inclusion in the record.
WHITEHOUSE: What happened to the $50k in cash that the FBI paid to Tom Homan in a paper bag?BONDI: … As Deputy AG Blanche recently stated, the investigation of Mr Homan was subjected to a full review by the FBI. They found no credible evidence of any wrongdoingWHITEHOUSE:… pic.twitter.com/xYBvR4kZEQ
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 7, 2025
The questions about Homan were far from the only ones that Bondi avoided answering during Tuesday’s hearing, in which she frequently seemed more interested in verbally attacking Democratic senators attempting to conduct oversight.
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