If you haven’t had time yet to soak in the details of the stunning Tom Homan story that Carol Leonnig and Ken Dilanian of MSNBC broke over the weekend, hold on to your hats. I’d say you won’t believe what you’re about to read, but of course, you will.
Last summer, FBI agents in west Texas were conducting an investigation of some sort or another. A subject of that investigation told the agents something that piqued their interest: Tom Homan, the former acting director of ICE and the man who everyone knew would be playing some sort of prominent role in border policy in a future Trump administration, was “soliciting payments in exchange for awarding contracts should Trump win the presidential election, according to an internal Justice Department summary of the probe reviewed by MSNBC and people familiar with the case.”
The FBI did what it did in such cases. It set up a sting operation in which agents posing as business executives offered Homan $50,000 cash in a bag. Loennig and Dilanian reported that “multiple people familiar with the probe and internal documents” said Homan took the money.
The FBI and Justice Department debated what to do. They decided—this was the Biden FBI and Justice Department, mind you, the one that Donald Trump says was rancidly political and did nothing but try to destroy political foes—not to bring charges. They decided to wait and see if Trump won, and if Homan then accepted bribes. It would be a much more airtight case. So the Biden people handed the investigation off to the Trump people, no doubt holding out the vain hope that the career people would persuade the political people that someone taking a bag of cash was something that ought to be investigated.
Do we know if Homan accepted any such bribes once he became Trump’s border czar? So far, we do not. One reason for that might be that he hasn’t taken any baksheesh. But another reason could rest in the fact that the Trump administration closed the investigation.
It’s not clear exactly when that happened. But Loennig and Dilanian report that it was in late January or early February that the matter was first brought to the attention of Emil Bove, then a high-ranking DOJ official. He told colleagues he didn’t support the investigation. This was around the same time he was ordering the quashing of the investigation into indicted New York Mayor Eric Adams, a move that led to 11 resignations from department attorneys aghast that Bove would do such a thing. The Homan case was supposed to go to the Public Integrity Section of DOJ. But gee, wouldn’t you know it? The Public Integrity Section is exactly the part of DOJ that Bove destroyed by ordering the end of the Adams investigation.
We learned of all this the same day that Trump decided it was time to just stop pretending and ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to prosecute three specific individuals: New York Attorney General Letitia James, Democratic Senator Adam Schiff, and former FBI director James Comey. He declared all three “guilty as hell” and wrote on social media: “We cant [sic] delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility.”
It should go without saying that none of this is normal. If a Democratic operative had gone around last year bragging that he would be playing a high-level role in a Harris administration and thus in a position to dispense favors and subsequently accepted a bag of cash for someone eager to get in good with the incoming Democratic team, the chance that the Harris DOJ would drop that probe would be zero. And just so this doesn’t sound partisan, I’d say the same of, say, a McCain or Romney administration. They’d have pursued the case, no question.
Likewise, the chance that Presidents Harris, McCain, and Romney would have publicly ordered their attorneys general to prosecute three high-ranking political opponents, two of them elected officials, is also zero. And for good measure, the left-leaning media wouldn’t have defended the bribe-taker or ginned up a lot of excuses on their behalf.
But here we are. The Justice Department is being destroyed—slowly at first, and now all at once. Most of the lawyers in the Civil Rights Division have left or are leaving. Ditto the Federal Programs Branch, the office that’s supposed to defend an administration’s claims in court. Reuters confirmed in July that 69 of 110 lawyers in that branch were skedaddling. The exodus figure for civil rights back in May was a similar 70 percent.
And who’s replacing them? Either nobody is, or recent graduates of, you know, Regent University law school. Or who knows? Do you even need to be a lawyer at all to work in Trump’s Justice Department? Remember, he just forced the resignation of Erik Siebert, a U.S. Attorney in Virginia, for failing to gin up a fake prosecution against Tish James. He posted that he planned to replace Siebert with Lindsey Halligan, a Trump favorite. She is at least a lawyer—but an insurance lawyer in Florida.
These are all developments that at any other time would have shocked the entire political establishment. Now? We’re used to it. Yes, sorry, we’re used to it. It’s just another day that ends in “y.” But we must not become blasé about it. It’s disgraceful. The Department of Justice is a cesspool. The dropping of the Adams case was an unspeakable affront. The dropping of the Homan investigation was and is indefensible. Ditto the firing of Siebert. But Trump’s weekend order to Bondi tops them all. Democratic Senator Chris Murphy said Sunday: “This is what happens in Iran, this is what happens in Cuba, this happens in China and deeply repressive states in which, if you have the courage to stand up and speak truth to power, you are silenced.”
Combine this with what happened last week to Jimmy Kimmel, and I think we can now just say it. The United States of America is no longer a democracy. It’s not a totally authoritarian state. I’m obviously writing these words of dissent, as are hundreds, thousands of others like me. We’re still having elections, so far. Most courts are still functioning normally. At many levels where the White House can’t just do turnkey autocracy, there is ferocious resistance. And there is a defiant public making their voices heard, alongside a not-insignificant faction of Trump voters who are growing disillusioned with what they’re seeing. And as the polls tell us, the mad king is failing to win people over, and public opinion, at least much of the time, still matters, too. These facts can reassure us.
But far too much evidence has now been amassed in the un-reassuring direction. A tipping point has been reached. I guess I should say that we need to wait and see what Bondi does, but what are the chances she defies Trump?
I’ll be interested to see how Freedom House, when it reports on 2025, rates the United States; its categories are “free,” “partly free,” and “not free.” The latest report, which surveys 2024, rates us “free.” That was always a given. But it’s far from that now.
