Now We’ll Never Know What Happened with Border Czar Tom Homan and the Bag of Money

“Nothing to it” is how border czar Tom Homan described the allegations that in September 2024, according to sources familiar with the case who spoke to The New York Times, he was recorded accepting $50,000 stuffed into a bag from the fast-casual chain Cava from undercover FBI agents. The FBI agents were initially investigating a different target, per sources who spoke to the Times, and were posing as businessmen looking for government contracts along the border. At the time of the investigation, Homan, who had served as acting head of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the first Trump administration, did not hold a government role, but sources told the Times he became the subject of an inquiry himself when authorities learned that a payment to Homan could allegedly lead to federal contracts for border security projects.

But when Trump returned to office in January, Homan began overseeing his shock-and-awe immigration crackdown. According to sources familiar with the matter who spoke to MSNBC, the FBI probe stalled soon after Trump took office, and in recent weeks, it was formally shut down. FBI director Kash Patel and deputy attorney general Todd Blanche called the investigation “baseless” in a statement Saturday, and the White House said the case was “blatantly political”—an example, spokesperson Abigail Jackson said, of Joe Biden’s administration using “resources to target President Trump’s allies rather than investigate real criminals and the millions of illegal aliens who flooded our country.”

The DOJ’s handling of the Homan case appears to underscore Trump’s own politicization of the justice system, in which he has all but granted impunity to his allies—including the violent January 6 rioters whose sentences he commuted or pardoned en masse on his first day in office—while seeking to use the powers of the state to crack down on political opponents.

The latter effort has been supercharged in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s killing: The president and top administration officials have vowed a crackdown on the left, which they blame for the conservative activist’s murder, and have already begun a crusade against critical press coverage and free speech. And in a social media post over the weekend, Trump exhorted attorney general Pam Bondi to go after his enemies more aggressively: “We can’t delay any longer,” he said in the post. “It’s killing our reputation and credibility.”

The message from the top couldn’t be clearer: “If you are a friend of the president, a loyalist of the president, you can get away with nearly anything,” as Democratic senator Chris Murphy put it to ABC News on Sunday. “But if you are an opponent of the president, you may find yourself in jail.”