White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has accused the Biden administration‘s FBI of attempting to “entrap” White House border czar Tom Homan following a report that the government official accepted a bribe of $50,000 from undercover federal agents.
“This was 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,” Leavitt told reporters during a briefing at the White House Monday afternoon.
“You had FBI 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,” Leavitt said.
Over the weekend, MSNBC reported that the FBI had recorded Homan accepting $50,000 in cash following an agreement to help undercover FBI agents posing as business executives lock down a large government contract.
Homan, the former acting head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, was reported as having traveled to Texas to receive the cash, which was recorded on camera. Leavitt denied that Homan received the money and said on Monday that “Mr. Homan never took the $50,000” and therefore would not have to give the money back.
The FBI had not referred the case to the U.S. Attorney’s office for prosecution because it was waiting to see if Homan would dole out the promised contract to the fake business.
Some officials inside the investigation and at the Justice Department believed that they had enough to bring a case against Homan for conspiracy to commit bribery.
Once President Donald Trump took office in January, then-acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove was briefed on the case and indicated that he did not support the investigation moving forward.
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Homan spent several years between government jobs as a consultant in the border security and immigration enforcement realm, where sources who spoke with MSNBC alleged that he told others he could help lockdown contracts in a future Trump administration.
“Mr. Homan did absolutely nothing wrong, and even the president’s Department of Justice, even Kash Patel’s FBI, looked into this just to make sure they had a number of different prosecutors and FBI agents who looked into this,” Leavitt said. “They found zero evidence of illegal activity or criminal wrongdoing. And the White House and the president stand by Tom Homan 100% because he did absolutely nothing wrong.”