Tom Homan
and the Case of the Missing Fifty Thousand
Lawmakers and ordinary citizens have to keep asking about
the bag of cash, or accept an executive branch without any accountability.
By Ruth Marcus
October 20, 2025
Photograph by Kevin Dietsch / Getty
Donald Trump’s second term is straining the national
capacity for outrage. There is only so much bandwidth to process the scandal—or
scandals—of the day. Worry over using the military to kill alleged drug
traffickers without legal authority gives way to worry over using the military
to quell domestic protests. The vindictive indictment of the former F.B.I.
director James Comey is followed by the vindictive indictment of New York’s
attorney general, Letitia
James. The President and his allies bully their way through episodes that
would engulf an ordinary Administration, one with a capacity for shame and a
lower pain threshold for bruising headlines. Soon enough, they figure, the
controversy will burn itself out and the media caravan will move on.
So it is with the border czar, Tom Homan, and the case of
the missing fifty thousand dollars. Homan, who had been the acting head of
Immigration and Customs Enforcement during Trump’s first term, was widely
expected to join him in a second. In September, 2024, F.B.I. agents, posing as
businessmen, sought his help securing government contracts in the event of
Trump’s reëlection. Homan reportedly accepted the money from them, stuffed into
a takeout bag from the restaurant chain Cava. According to numerous news
outlets, there is an audio recording of the transaction. The investigation was
dropped once Trump took office, for reasons that remain murky. Did the
President’s enablers in the Justice Department kill a criminal case against one
of his top advisers? Or did weaknesses in the evidence, combined with the
Supreme Court’s recent hostility toward public corruption cases, compel
prosecutors to stand down? Meanwhile, another basic question remains
unanswered: Where’s the fifty thousand?
The ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos raised this issue with Vice-President J. D. Vance on
October 12th—and kept at it, no easy feat given the time constraints of live
television. Vance’s performance embodied the Administration’s approach to
unwelcome subjects: aggrieved hostility, intentional misdirection, and
relentless incuriosity. “Did he keep that money or give it back?”
Stephanopoulos asked Vance—by my count, the first of five times. “Tom Homan did
not take a bribe. It’s a ridiculous smear,” Vance said. “And the reason you
guys are going after Tom Homan so aggressively is because he’s doing the job of
enforcing the law.” Vance complained that Stephanopoulos had “covered this
story ad nauseam.” He continued, “I think that it would be a much more
interesting story about why is it that Tom Homan, who is simply enforcing
America’s immigration laws, is constantly harassed and threatened to the point
of death threats.”
Stephanopoulos persisted: “Are you saying that he did not
accept the fifty thousand dollars?” Vance responded, “I’m sure that in the
course of Tom Homan’s life he has been paid more than fifty thousand dollars
for services. The question is: Did he do something illegal? And there’s
absolutely no evidence that Tom Homan has ever taken a bribe or done anything
illegal.” But the question, as Stephanopoulos kept insisting, was not about
whether this rose to the level of criminality. It was about whether Homan took
the money. According to reporting by MSNBC and others, the F.B.I. had been
tipped off in an unconnected investigation that Homan might be willing to steer
contracts to the supposed businessmen in exchange for a million dollars. He
appears to have taken a down payment stuffed into a Cava bag. This
is not, Vance’s studied ignorance notwithstanding, a normal way of doing
business. “Accepting fifty thousand dollars for doing what, George? I’m not
even sure I understand the question. Is it illegal to take a payment for doing
services?” Vance huffed. “Nobody has accused Tom of violating a crime, even the
far-left media like yourself. So I’m actually not sure what the precise
question is. Did he accept fifty thousand dollars? Honestly, George, I don’t
know the answer to that question. What I do know is that he didn’t violate a
crime.”
The Vice-President, it must be noted, graduated from Yale
Law School, where presumably he learned something about what it takes to
“violate a crime”—and how behavior that does not rise to the level of
criminality can nonetheless be suspicious and blameworthy. The incoming Trump
Administration was reportedly alerted to the investigation. It must have
realized that a story this odiferous had a high likelihood of being leaked, yet
it gave Homan a prominent role. It is hard to imagine another Administration in
the post-Watergate era making that judgment—even if officials didn’t find
Homan’s actions morally repugnant, they would avoid him out of
self-preservation. But for the Trump team, with its high tolerance for
embarrassment and supreme confidence in its impunity, there isn’t much that is
off the table. So the Administration can brazen its way through self-serving
deals that would have made its predecessors blanch: the gift of a luxury jet
from Qatar; the various ventures into cryptocurrency, including a gala dinner
for the biggest investors in the $TRUMP meme coin. A bag of cash pales by
comparison.
The Stephanopoulos-Vance encounter was not the
Administration’s first effort to shut down the Homan story. Shortly after MSNBC
broke the news of the cash transfer, in late September, the White House press
secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told a reporter, “Well, Mr. Homan never took the
fifty thousand dollars that you’re referring to, so you should get your facts
straight.” The investigation, Leavitt asserted, had represented “another
example of the weaponization of the Biden Department of Justice against one of
President Trump’s strongest and most vocal supporters in the midst of a
Presidential campaign. You had F.B.I. agents going undercover to try and entrap
one of the President’s top allies and supporters, someone who they knew very
well would be taking a government position months later.” Homan, she said, “did
absolutely nothing wrong.”
On October 7th, at the Senate Judiciary Committee’s
oversight hearing for Attorney General Pam Bondi, four Democratic
senators—Sheldon Whitehouse, of Rhode Island; Mazie Hirono, of Hawaii; Alex
Padilla, of California; and Peter Welch, of Vermont—also raised the matter of
the missing fifty thousand. Bondi’s response was characteristically bristling
and evasive; Whitehouse asked about the money seven times, to no avail. “You’re
very concerned about money and people taking money and you rail against dark money
yet you work with dark-money groups all the time,” Bondi told him. When
Whitehouse asked Bondi if investigators had examined whether Homan reported the
fifty thousand as taxable income, Bondi retorted, “Senator, I would be more
concerned, if I were you when you talk about corruption and money,
that . . . you pushed for legislation that would subsidize your
wife’s company.” (Sandra Whitehouse, a marine biologist, has worked for an
ocean-conservation group that receives federal funds for which her husband voted.
The Senate Ethics Committee has dismissed two complaints on this subject.) The
investigation into Homan “was resolved prior to my confirmation as Attorney
General,” Bondi told Welch. “It’s not resolved. There’s fifty thousand
dollars,” Welch responded. “Homan has it, or somebody has it. Do you have no
interest in knowing where it is?” Bondi replied, “You’re not going to sit here
and slander Tom Homan.”
Homan, for his part, has tried a couple of different
defenses. “Look, I did nothing criminal. I did nothing illegal,” he told Laura
Ingraham, of Fox News, in September. Ingraham didn’t press Homan about whether
he’d taken the money, and he didn’t deny it. Appearing Wednesday evening on
NewsNation, Homan was more definitive. “I didn’t take fifty thousand dollars
from anybody,” he declared, and added a helping of self-pity. “There’s been hit
pieces on me since I came back to this Administration,” he said. “What people
don’t talk about is I took a significant, huge pay cut to come back and serve
my nation, and I’m not enriching myself doing this job.”
The beauty of the Homan story is that its elements are so
easily grasped: the undercover agents, the alleged dangling of contracts, the
Cava bag, the missing cash. You don’t have to plow through the intricacies of
international law or the economics of meme coins to understand that there is
every indication that something very wrong happened, whether or not it amounted
to a crime. To ask about this, again and again, is not slander, it is an
obligation—of reporters, lawmakers, and the public. Because to let this episode
slide—to allow it to be overtaken by the next outrage and the one to
follow—would be to accept that no accountability is ever imposed on anyone in
Trump’s orbit. Where’s the fifty thousand? ♦
Ruth Marcus, a
former columnist for the Washington Post, became a contributing writer at The
New Yorker in June, 2025. She is the author of “Supreme
Ambition: Brett Kavanaugh and the Conservative Takeover.”
