Money Grab/Pardon donors and drop cases against friends
DOJ closes the bribery case against Tom Homan, filmed taking a $50,000 bag
In September 2024, undercover FBI agents recorded Tom Homan accepting a bag containing $50,000 in cash and appearing to agree to help them win immigration contracts if Trump returned to office. On September 21, 2025, the FBI director and the deputy attorney general said the case was closed with no charges.
What happened
In August 2024, in the last months of the Biden administration, the FBI opened an investigation into Tom Homan, who had run immigration enforcement in Trump’s first term and was expected to return. It began when the target of an unrelated national-security case kept telling investigators that Homan was taking money in exchange for promises of future government contracts. Agents set up a sting.
In September 2024, according to Reuters, MSNBC and the New York Times, undercover agents posing as businessmen met Homan and handed him a bag from the restaurant chain Cava containing $50,000. They recorded him appearing to agree to help them win immigration-related contracts if Trump won. Trump won, and named Homan his border czar. The case stalled.
In the summer of 2025 FBI Director Kash Patel ordered the case closed. On September 21, 2025, after the reporting surfaced, Patel and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said agents and prosecutors had found “no credible evidence of any criminal wrongdoing.” The White House said Homan had no role in awarding contracts. Homan denied wrongdoing.
Who benefited
Homan kept his job as border czar and faces no charge. The administration did not have to explain a recording of its border czar taking a bag of cash. Whoever gave Homan the money got what the sting was designed to test: that he would take it.
Who wanted something
Homan wanted the case gone, and the people Trump had installed at the FBI and the Justice Department were the ones who could make it go. The investigation was closed by the director of the FBI, not by the agents and prosecutors who had built it.
Who lost out
The agents who ran the sting built a case that the FBI director closed over their heads. The rule that a recorded cash payment to a soon-to-be official is investigated to its end by people who do not work for him did not hold. The public has only anonymous sources and a two-sentence statement to go on, because the file was shut.
Why it matters
This is the only receipt in the record with the cash literally in a bag, and the $50,000 is the smallest sum on the site. The act that matters is the second one: in 2025 the men the president appointed to run federal law enforcement closed the case against the man he appointed to run deportations.
Sources Reuters (via Hawaii Tribune-Herald)CNN (via KVIA)Business Day (Reuters)