Devlin Barrett

Right.

Which is why I say I think it's a mistake to assume that this ruling will stop efforts at retribution, efforts at payback, because I think the Trump administration has made clear they're going to keep looking for cases and places to pursue retribution.

George, I don't know what you're talking about.

Did he accept $50,000 for what?

Did the FBI get it back?

So I cover the Justice Department and the FBI.

And months ago, I had started hearing rumblings that there had been some kind of bribery investigation related to Tom Holman.

But I couldn't quite figure out what it was about or where it was.

And for a while, it just was a puzzle I couldn't solve.

It's pretty busy at the DOJ and the FBI most days.

Then sometime in September, I got a little more information where someone knew some of the answers to these questions and said, you know, oh, you mean the case with a bag of cash?

Well, right.

That's not, you know, what you would think of as like, let's call it regular business practice, right?

It's almost the stereotypical way that people think of corruption cases.

So from that point, I started putting more pieces together and figuring more things out.

I wasn't the only reporter chasing corruption.

This MSNBC also figured it out.

And so what I eventually came to understand was that there had been beginning really in 2023, but stretching all the way into this year, a really fascinating investigation that came to include Tom Holman.

As it's been described to me by sources, if you go back to the spring of 2023, the FBI in Texas was conducting an undercover investigation related to a particular businessman.

And the investigation, my sources were adamant, was not looking at Tom Holman at all.