It’s been nearly a month since the public first learned about the bribery controversy surrounding White House border czar Tom Homan, which means administration officials have had plenty of time to come up with answers to obvious questions and talking points related to the burgeoning scandal. They don’t appear to have come up with much.
Last week, for example, several Democratic senators pressed Attorney General Pam Bondi for answers about the Homan matter, and she refused to engage when pressed for details, dodging every relevant question.
On Sunday, another prominent member of Team Trump struggled just as much. Politico reported:
Vice President JD Vance sparred Sunday with George Stephanopoulos in a discussion when the ABC host asked about White House border czar Tom Homan. The segment on ‘This Week’ ended with Stephanopoulos saying ‘You did not answer the question’ even as Vance tried one final time to rebut him.
For those just joining us, undercover FBI agents recorded Homan about a year ago allegedly accepting $50,000 in cash after indicating he could help the agents (who were posing as businessmen) win government contracts in a second Trump administration.
The matter was under investigation, right up until Trump returned to the White House, at which point the probe stalled. Last month, the case was closed altogether.
Initially, there were questions about why the investigation into Homan ended so abruptly and the degree to which politics might’ve been involved in derailing the probe.
But the other question is about the alleged bribe itself.
Homan sat down with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham last month, and the host offered him an opportunity to deny the underlying allegations. The White House official insisted that he “did nothing illegal,” but it was hard not to notice that he carefully avoided the underlying question about whether he accepted $50,000 in cash in a bag from undercover FBI agents.
Complicating matters, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted that Homan “never took the $50,000,” which was at odds with everything we’ve learned about the case.
With this in mind, Stephanopoulos asked the vice president a reasonable question: Did Homan keep the money, or did he give it back?
Vance insisted that the White House border czar “did not take a bribe,” which may or may not be true, but which also wasn’t an answer to the underlying question.
As the two went back and forth, the Ohio Republican eventually said, “Did he accept $50,000? I am sure that in the course of Tom Homan’s life he has been paid more than $50,000 for services. … Is it illegal to take a payment for doing services?”
Vance’s question was obviously rhetorical, though if he were interested in an answer, I’d remind him that while it’s not illegal to take a payment for doing services, it might be illegal to accept $50,000 in cash from undercover FBI agents while promising to help them in exchange for the money.
As MSNBC’s Ken Dilanian noted, “Homan has not disputed that he took the cash. The unanswered question is whether he kept it.”
The attorney general and the vice president have refused to answer that question, which only makes the broader controversy that much more provocative.
For what it’s worth, the Trump administration could simply release the FBI recording of the undercover agents’ interaction with Homan, which would presumably help clear things up, but the folks who claim to be the “most transparent” officials in the history of the planet have so far kept the tapes under wraps.
As regular readers know, “Release the Epstein files” has been a common mantra for quite a while. “Release the Homan tapes” is just getting started. Watch this space.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
