By James J. Devine
The bag was from Cava. A chain you find in any strip mall, selling Mediterranean bowls. Inside this one, however, wasn’t rice and lamb. It was fifty thousand dollars in cash.
And the man taking it, Tom Homan, wasn’t some two-bit hustler on a street corner. He was a guy on television who talked tough about the law and was about to become the most powerful border chief in the country.
Trump spent about $15 billion building border hysteria during his first four years in office, but the law he signed into law in July 2025 allocates $170 billion toward immigration and border enforcement.
This is the story, laid out in black and white by The New York Times, MSNBC and a legion of other media outlets, of how the law works for some, and how it gets shut down for others. It’s a story recorded on audiotape: undercover FBI agents, posing as businessmen, hand over the cash.
Homan, according to people who know the case, takes it and agrees to help them secure government contracts for border security once his friend is back in the White House.
A promise was made. Cash changed hands. It’s a scene from a bad movie, but it happened in real life.
Homan wasn’t the target of the investigation, but when undercover FBI agents handed him $50,000 in cash and he took it, agreeing to help them secure future border security contracts, he became one.
Then, the election happened. The man who took the bag was named border czar. And the investigation into that bag of cash was closed down by the very Justice Department he would now work beside.
Trump has continued cueing up one wildly irrational, hate-filled neo-nazi nativist talking point after another about lawless and marauding foreigners menacing the safety and pillaging the birthrights of Real White Christian America.
He stands at the podium and lets the poison flow, one unhinged fantasy after another, painting a militant, ultranationalist, and right-wing extremist story told to stoke the fears of unsuspecting Americans. It is his oldest, darkest tune, and he plays it without shame.
The official word from on high, from Trump’s hand-picked FBI director and his deputy attorney general, is that there was no crime here.
They said the case was “baseless,” that the department needs to focus on “real threats.”
They said he wasn’t a government official at the time, that maybe you couldn’t prove he’d promise one specific thing for that specific stack of bills.
It’s a clean, quiet ending. A door shut. A file stamped “closed.” No messy questions, no awkward trials for a top official.
But in the shadows, the people who know the details tell a different story.
One says the evidence didn’t meet every element of a complex crime. Another says the case was killed prematurely, before anyone could even try to gather that evidence.
It was Emil Bove III—then a senior Justice Department official and, at one time, Trump’s personal lawyer, who is now sitting on a federal appeals court—who early on expressed skepticism. The fix, it seems, was in early.
Recent Supreme Court rulings have redefined what constitutes a bribe, virtually legalizing all sorts of corrupt acts, and adding layers to the two-tiered system of injustice that real Americans truly despise.
“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,” said FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who issued a joint statement on Saturday.
They added that the Justice Department “must remain focused on real threats to the American people, not baseless investigations. As a result, the investigation has been closed.”
Abigail Jackson, a spokesperson for the only convicted criminal to occupy the White House, called the case a “blatantly political investigation,” and claimed the Biden administration “was using its resources to target President Trump’s allies rather than investigate real criminals and the millions of illegal aliens who flooded our country.”
Homan cursed and denied taking the $50,000 cash for promises of government contracts, but if there’s any “bullshit” the denial itself reeks of a lie.
Homan had been recorded while indicating he could help them win government contracts in a second Trump administration and accepting the $50,000 from agents posing as business people as part of an undercover operation.
Trump flunkies Patel and Blanche acknowledged that the investigation was legitimate, even though they buried it.
Homan was caught on tape accepting a bag filled with $50,000 in cash from an undercover FBI agent in September 2024, when he was a private citizen who was likely to land a government job if Trump won the election. At the time, Homan was being floated for a top immigration job.
It started with someone else, but the probe found Tom Homan. A government contractor, caught in an unrelated counterintelligence probe, told undercover FBI agents that a million dollars to the right man could buy a contract. So the agents set a meeting. They brought a bag stuffed not a million, but fifty thousand in cash.
Homan, the man who talks tough on law and order, took it.
The defense was all about timing: he wasn’t in government yet, and Trump wasn’t president. A technicality. But the tape didn’t lie. He took the cash, knowing a job was waiting where he could deliver.
Some prosecutors saw it for what it was: a down payment on corruption. They were overruled. Trump— knowing Homan took the cash— still gave him the job.
So the man who was recorded taking a bag with fifty grand now runs deportation policy.
David Frum, who served as special assistant to President George W. Bush, observed, “If Tom Homan accepted $50,000 in cash in September 2024, that money should have been declared on his tax return in April 2025. If not, that’s another legal hazard for him.”
The investigation is a memory. And the only thing left is the image of a takeout bag, worth maybe ten bucks, carrying a small fortune, and the smell of something that went bad long before it was ever delivered.