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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is Andrew Ross Sorkin, the founder of Dealbook. Every year, I interview some of the world's most influential leaders across politics, culture, and business at the Dealbook Summit, a live event in New York City. On this year's podcast, you'll hear my unfiltered conversations with Gavin Newsom, the CEO of Palantir and Anthropic, and Erica Kirk, the widow of Charlie Kirk.
Listen to Dealbook Summit wherever you get your podcasts.
From The New York Times, I'm Natalie Kittroff. This is The Daily.
The White House border czar Tom Holman was recorded on an FBI surveillance tape in September 2024, accepting $50,000 in cash. Did he keep that money or give it back?
For the past few weeks, Trump officials have been asked repeatedly about an undercover FBI investigation of border czar Tom Holman.
What became of the $50,000 in cash that the FBI delivered to Mr. Holman?
And consistently, they've sidestepped. Did he accept that $50,000 or not?
George, I don't know what you're talking about. Did he accept $50,000 for what?
Or refuse to answer key questions.
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Chapter 2: What is the FBI investigation involving Tom Homan about?
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.
Yeah.
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. But in the course of that investigation, that businessman told the undercover agents that
If those agents who are posing as businessmen looking for government contracts, if they were willing to pay Tom Holman a million dollars, he could steer government contracts to them.
So these agents weren't initially fishing for anything related to Tom Holman. They weren't looking at him at that time.
My sources are adamant that no one had asked about Tom Holman. That was brought up unprompted. And Tom Holman just sort of wanders into the picture, wanders into the frame of what the FBI agents are already doing.
Wow. Just to put us in time here, we're in 2023.
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Chapter 3: What happened to the $50,000 cash delivered to Tom Homan?
We know Tom Holman as the former ICE director in the first Trump administration, this longtime border official. He actually served in the Obama administration, but he's not in government at this point, right?
Right. He's just a private citizen and he runs a consulting business for companies that are seeking contracts. So it's not completely out of the blue that he would have some interest in government contracts. But again, he's not in government at that time. And he's known mostly as a former Trump official who is what they sometimes call a campaign surrogate.
He often would appear, you know, speaking publicly in support of another Trump administration. And there's a lot of general expectation that if Trump wins reelection, Holman will rejoin the government. And in November of 2023, he out and out says it. He says, you know, I promised President Trump that if he goes back, I go back.
And then he added to that, and I'm going to run the biggest deportation operation this country's ever seen.
Right. He's widely seen as a likely member of a future Trump administration. He's saying he's going to be there. And there's this sense that a lot of money is going to be thrown at the area that he's going to be involved in, in border enforcement.
Well, right. That whole time period that Trump campaign is talking about deporting millions of people. It is a very expensive prospect. So there is a natural expectation that there will be significant government contracts related to both border security work and deportation work.
OK, so back to the investigation. What happens next?
So once that businessman just sort of proposes this notion that the undercover agents could pay Tom Homan to get government contracts, a series of conversations follow. This investigation goes on for a long time, but eventually a meeting is set up for September 20th, 2024. And at that meeting, my sources tell me the undercover agents bring $50,000 in cash.
And that cash is put in a takeout food bag, a bag from the chain Kava. So what has been described to me is at that meeting,
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Chapter 4: How did Tom Homan respond to allegations of accepting cash?
Homan both accepts the cash and seems to convey that he's willing to help them get contracts in the future.
Do we know exactly what he says? Devlin, do we have any specific information about that?
We don't know exactly what he says, and that's obviously a big question in this whole process. But we do know that the FBI agents made an audio recording of the meeting. So somewhere in government files there exists, I am told, an audio recording of this discussion. And what's been described to me is that Homan accepts the cash and leaves. And that's a great start to an investigation.
You've got a lot to work with there, right? Because the person you're investigating has taken the money and appears to have agreed to do things in exchange for the money. But that's not really the end of the investigation. Why not? For a couple of reasons. One, because there was no very specific act that he agreed to do in exchange for that money.
And two, it's important to remember, at the time he takes the money, Tom Homan is still not a government official. He certainly can't make the Biden administration, which was running the government at that time, award contracts. So in the moment the cash is handed over, Homan really can't deliver even if he wants to.
Right. I guess the assumption here is that this is like a down payment for future services that he could potentially render, correct?
Right. The investigators thought of it as this is the start of the relationship. This is the start of the process.
Devlin, does that help explain a question I've had about all this, which is $50,000 is a lot of money, but it also doesn't feel like enough for someone like Homan to do something this risky that could really jeopardize his career.
Right. It wasn't necessarily that you give him this $50,000 and then he immediately starts doing things for you. One source described it as, you know, they paid money to make a friend in a regular corruption investigation. There would naturally be follow-up meetings, maybe follow-up payments. That's certainly a possibility in such an investigation scenario.
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