Fox News has yet to address on-air the recent reports that White House border czar Tom Homan, while working as a contributor for the network in September 2024, accepted a bag of cash from undercover FBI agents as part of a corruption investigation which was subsequently closed under the Trump administration.
MSNBC reported on Saturday:
In an undercover operation last year, the FBI recorded Tom Homan, now the White House border czar, accepting $50,000 in cash after indicating he could help the agents — who were posing as business executives — win government contracts in a second Trump administration, according to multiple people familiar with the probe and internal documents reviewed by MSNBC.
The FBI and the Justice Department planned to wait to see whether Homan would deliver on his alleged promise once he became the nation’s top immigration official. But the case indefinitely stalled soon after Donald Trump became president again in January, according to six sources familiar with the matter. In recent weeks, Trump appointees officially closed the investigation, after FBI Director Kash Patel requested a status update on the case, two of the people said.
It’s unclear what reasons FBI and Justice Department officials gave for shutting down the investigation. But a Trump Justice Department appointee called the case a “deep state” probe in early 2025 and no further investigative steps were taken, the sources say.
The federal investigation was launched in western Texas in the summer of 2024 after a subject in a separate investigation claimed Homan was soliciting payments in exchange for awarding contracts should Trump win the presidential election, according to an internal Justice Department summary of the probe reviewed by MSNBC and people familiar with the case.
The handoff, according to MSNBC, came on September 20, 2024, while Homan was making frequent appearances on Fox as a paid network contributor in which he promoted Trump’s xenophobic positions. Homan had joined Fox after retiring as ICE’s acting director in 2018, a position in which he reportedly served as the “intellectual ‘father’” of the Trump administration’s depraved family separation policy.
The New York Times and ABC News subsequently confirmed MSNBC’s reporting, with the Times adding the detail that the cash payment had been “made inside a bag from the food chain Cava.”
Notably, in their statements to the outlets, FBI Director Kash Patel, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, and White House deputy press secretary Abigail Jackson did not deny the reporting that Homan had been recorded taking a bag of cash from undercover agents. Instead, they claimed that the Justice Department had not uncovered evidence of illicit activity when it closed the investigation.
But MSNBC’s legal experts concluded that while Homan’s “actions didn’t clearly fit under a standard bribery charge” because neither he nor Trump were in office at the time, further investigation was warranted to determine whether he would continue accepting bags of cash once he was a public official. (A lesser charge would have been possible based on his promise to commit the crime, and MSNBC reported that “several FBI and Justice officials believed that they had a strong criminal case.”)
To state the obvious: Fox would be covering this story if it implicated a Democratic official and administration. But as of posting time (noon ET), the network has not mentioned it.
Homan is the lynchpin of the right’s anti-immigrant strategy. He makes regular appearances on Fox and throughout the MAGA media ecosystem, helping them churn out propaganda in support of Trump’s cruel, unlawful, and increasingly unpopular mass deportation policies.
Homan is a loyal member of the Trump team, and so its other members are uninterested in whether he was taking bags of cash in exchange for promises of future favors. Former Fox host Megyn Kelly made this explicit, responding to the MSNBC scoop over the weekend by posting, “We DO NOT CARE. Don’t bother [Homan] he’s a national treasure.”
