As the first and only convicted felon to serve as president, Donald Trump's claim to be concerned about crime in America is a somewhat compromised one. And, of course, it's not just the 34 felony counts on which he stands convicted by a New York jury but the federal criminal indictments for violating the Espionage Act, obstructing justice and defrauding the United States that undercut his proclamations about crime just a tad.
In the past month, Tom Homan, Trump's border czar, who has spent the past nine months talking tough about undocumented immigrants, has had a severe case of "cat got your tongue" about some fairly damning reporting indicating that he perhaps also isn't the ideal face of crime fighting.
According to highly credible reports — made even more credible by the fact that neither the attorney general nor the FBI director denied them — the guy tasked by a felonious president to pursue those here illegally was recorded in September 2024 accepting $50,000 in cash in a restaurant takeout bag from FBI agents posing as businessmen seeking lucrative government contracts to provide border security. Homan, president and owner of something called Homeland Strategic Consulting, was selling himself as the go-to guy for winning government contracts for border security. His pitch: "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."
Translation: Give me a lot of money and I'll get you a real lot of money.
At the time, Homan, whom Trump had appointed head of ICE in his first administration, was boasting that if Trump won, he'd be in a position to do just that. "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 told a right-wing conference in July 2024, just weeks before his alleged meeting with the undercover agents.
Since taking office, Homan has done his best Macho-Man bit before every news camera he could find. Which is why, when news broke last month that he was on tape accepting 50K in cash and that the Trump administration quickly shut down the investigation shortly after taking over, his reticence about speaking was somewhat notable. Our crime fighter availed himself of his right to remain silent, rather than answering obvious questions like these:
Did you accept the bag of cash in a restaurant takeout bag?
Did you think the bag contained cheeseburgers and some fries?
Why did you take it?
What did you do with the cash, did you keep it, did you declare it as income and did you pay taxes on it?
Tough-talking Tom dodged the questions. Which did not exactly make one disbelieve the reporting.
When Homan broke his silence, what he said was not exactly a denial that he had taken the money. "Look, I did nothing criminal," he said, carefully. "I did nothing illegal."
How do you figure? We're all ears.
After weeks of that non-denial denial, Homan apparently decided that he had better revise and extend his remarks. "I didn't take $50,000 from anybody," he said, with reason to believe that the Trump administration would never let any materials that contradicted him see the light of day.
Even his particular formulation was curious. Had he taken not 50K, but 35K or 75K?
Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee wrote the attorney general and the FBI director asking them to come clean about whether our border czar is crooked. "Confirmed by six sources and reportedly captured on recordings now in DOJ and FBI's possession," they wrote, "this startling episode is powerful evidence that Mr. Homan may have committed multiple federal felonies, including conspiracy to commit bribery. ... We demand that both of you immediately turn over all recordings from Mr. Homan's meeting, as well as all files from this investigation of purported bribery involving Mr. Homan."
The White House will disclose these materials promptly after pigs fly. Don't hold your breath. And we should all be plenty smart enough to draw the appropriate inference.
Jeff Robbins' latest book, "Notes From the Brink: A Collection of Columns about Policy at Home and Abroad," is available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books and Google Play. Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. An attorney specializing in the First Amendment and a longtime columnist, he writes on politics, national security, human rights and the Middle East.
Photo credit: Thomas Kinto at Unsplash
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