An FBI investigation into the hiring of President Donald Trump’s border czar Tom Homan led top agency officials to bypass typical security clearance procedures, a new report claims.
Homan’s status as target of a bribery investigation by FBI agents - who allegedly recorded him accepting $50,000 in cash from operatives posing as businessmen - was passed to Emil Bove, days before his appointment as acting deputy attorney general in early January 2025, an MS NOW investigation revealed Tuesday.
Bove, formerly Trump’s personal attorney, served as a top liaison between the government and the transition before he himself joined the DOJ.
Bove and other top members of Trump’s transition team worked to ensure that the FBI investigation didn’t cause hiccups in Homan’s background check process when the information reached them in early January, days before the inauguration and weeks after it typically would have come up in the background clearance process. The delay, according to MS NOW, was due to Trump’s team not submitting Homan and other incoming officials’ names to the FBI to begin the background check process until December 2024, a month later than usual.
Homan eventually was hired by the administration as the White House border czar, officially styled as the “White House Executive Associate Director of Enforcement and Removal Operations”. According to MS NOW, it remains unclear how Homan obtained a security clearance after FBI agents believed that he was not able to pass a background check.
The Independent has asked the DOJ and DHS for comment on Homan’s security check process.
White House officials claimed that MS NOW’s reporting was an attempt to dredge up an old story. Homan declined to answer questions about his hiring process when news of the probe originally broke in September.
“This was a blatantly political investigation, that found no evidence of illegal activity, and was yet another example of how the Biden Department of Justice 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,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told the news outlet.
“Tom Homan is a career law enforcement officer and lifelong public servant who is doing a phenomenal job on behalf of President Trump and the country.”
Homan’s alleged involvement in the FBI probe amounted to a picture of apparent bribery. MS NOW, formerly MSNBC, reported in September that Homan was caught on video accepting $50,000 in a Cava bag from undercover FBI agents who pretended to be seeking contracts related to immigration enforcement under a second Trump administration.
The video has not been released publicly. The White House and Homan have denied that it exists, and say that the exchange never occurred.
MS NOW’s reporting also stated that the Homan investigation - which began in early 2024 under the Biden administration - was shut down by the Justice Department this summer, months after Trump took office and after Bove and FBI Director Kash Patel reportedly “registered their displeasure” with the case continuing.
Immigration enforcement was a key plank of Trump’s 2024 campaign and has been a central focus of several top officials in his second administration, including Homan and senior White House aide Stephen Miller.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids have swept the country as officials aim to deport at least 1 million undocumented immigrants in the first year of Trump’s second term.
A Department of Homeland Security news release in mid-December claimed that just over 600,000 deportations have taken place so far in 2025 while more than 2.5 other “illegal aliens” departed the U.S. voluntarily this year. The latter number has not been confirmed by experts outside of the Trump administration.
Democrats in Congress have called for hearings over Homan’s alleged bribery case but Republican control of both chambers has stymied any effort by the president’s critics to call Homan for testimony.
“No one is above the law. The American people deserve to know why President Trump’s so-called Border Czar allegedly used his position and influence to take bribes in his own self-interest. Congress must investigate Tom Homan’s actions and his influence on government spending. We urgently request that you call him to testify before the Committee on this matter without delay,” wrote the House Homeland Security Committee’s ranking Democratic member, Bennie Thompson, to the panel’s Republican chair in September.
Chris Murphy, the top Senate Democrat on the Appropriations subcommittee that oversees ICE and DHS, claimed that Homan’s case shows the Trump administration’s dual standards of justice for allies of the president and everyone else.
“See what happened to Tom Homan, his border czar, who literally accepted a bag of cash —$50,000 — and the investigation was dropped once Trump became president,” Murphy told ABC News this fall.
"There are just two standards of justice now in this country. If you are a friend of the president, a loyalist of the president you can get away with nearly anything ... but if you are an opponent of the president, you may find yourself in jail."
Trump’s Justice Department moved to dismiss a criminal case against the aerospace giant Boeing over the fatal 737 MAX airliner crashes after the company donated to the president’s inauguration fund.
Some of Trump’s supporters have received favorable treatment from the federal justice system including the former CEO of Johnny Rockets and Fatburger Andrew Wiederhorn, who saw his corporate fraud charges dismissed and the lead prosecutor on his case fired for making anti-Trump statements. The prosecution of a former Republican congressman, Jeff Fortenberry, was ended less than two weeks after Trump’s inauguration; the president pubicly complained about the case and Fortenberry’s prosecution under the Biden administration.
The DOJ has focused its attentions on criminal investigations into Trump’s perceived enemies, like New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey. In a series Vanity Fair interviews published earlier this month, Trump’s White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, said of James’s case: “Well, that might be the one retribution.”
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