Karoline Leavitt Gives Trump’s Border Czar a $50,000 Pass

Did the White House just gift $50,000 in stolen bribes to President Donald Trump’s border czar Tom Homan?

A reporter asked White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt Monday if Trump had asked the Department of Justice to close a bribery investigation into Homan, and whether the border czar would be forced to return the $50,000 payoff he allegedly received from undercover FBI agents posing as business executives.

“Well, Mr. Homan never took the $50,000 that you’re referring to, so you should get your facts straight, number one,” Leavitt replied.

But Homan was reportedly caught on camera accepting a Cava bag containing a $50,000 bribe from undercover agents during a meeting in Texas in September 2024. He allegedly promised agents who he thought were potential business partners that if Trump won, Homan could ensure favorable contracts for border enforcement. It was not immediately clear what happened to the money.

MSNBC’s Ken Dilanian, who’d broken the story about Homan, hit back at Leavitt’s claim Monday. “That was not part of their statement when we first went to them on Saturday. Multiple people familiar with the case say he did accept the money, as does an internal government document reviewed by MSNBC,” Dilanian wrote on X.

Leavitt said that the investigation into Homan was just “another example of 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 claimed the Biden administration had tried to “entrap” Homan but didn’t account for why his camp wouldn’t have released that information ahead of the presidential election.

“Mr. Homan did absolutely nothing wrong,” Leavitt said, adding that FBI Director Kash Patel had looked into it and found “zero evidence of illegal activity or criminal wrongdoing.”

In recent weeks, Trump appointees at the Department of Justice reportedly shuttered the probe into Homan, which had been part of a long-running counterintelligence investigation targeting multiple people, anonymous sources told The New York Times. DOJ officials reportedly determined that they had insufficient evidence to support charges against Homan.

Prosecutors were also concerned about whether they could actually prove corruption because Homan did not hold a government position at the time of the meeting. But as Leavitt noted during her briefing Monday, Homan was someone the Biden administration “knew very well would be taking a government position months later.”

This story has been updated.

A new report by Ben Terris of New York magazine scrutinizes the shadow role that Corey Lewandowski, a hot-headed MAGA operative and longtime associate of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, enjoys at DHS. Lewandowski’s reach is so extensive, and so disruptive, that it’s even ticked off the president.

Lewandowski and Noem are widely believed to be engaged in an extramarital affair with one another. They deny this, but such rumors were reportedly enough to help dash Lewandowski’s attempt to be named Noem’s chief of staff earlier this year.

But now he de facto serves in that role anyway, Terris writes. DHS officials describe him as Noem’s “handler” or “bulldog” (uh oh!), as well as a “shadow secretary.”

Lewandowski works at the department as a “special government employee,” a designation for temporary personnel who work unpaid for no more than 130 days a year—though he’s reportedly gone to great lengths to avoid counting days toward this limit. The designation comes with a key benefit for Lewandowski: He can work for Noem while still conducting business with undisclosed outside clients.

At DHS, Lewandowski is said to be “a micromanager who will approve and deny travel requests made by ICE employees.” He has also fired and reassigned dozens of staffers, who are afraid to say anything back lest he “rip their heads off,” according to one person close to the Trump administration.

Terris recounts several instances of Lewandowski’s influence at DHS.

When a DHS employee responded to orders from Lewandowski over the phone by saying he reported to Noem, “all of a sudden, you hear the secretary say, ‘It’s coming from me,’” a source told Terris. “She was on the call, in the background, not saying anything.”

Matt Strickland, a former government contractor for DHS, said “Lewandowski is running DHS. Kristi Noem is just the face of it.” Strickland said Lewandowski must greenlight every major decision in the department’s Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office.

Noem’s disastrous rule that all DHS expenditures exceeding $100,000 must get her approval also extends to Lewandowski. “Everything has to go through Corey,” a lobbyist who’s worked with DHS told Terris. “It’s all based on ‘You’re my buddy, or you’re not my buddy. You hired my friend, or you didn’t hire my friend.’ That place just runs that way.”

“It’s the Corey show over there,” said a former administration official.

Lewandowski and Noem, according to an administration official Terris cites, “sort of avoid being at the White House” so as not to be “overexposed.” Last month, reports about delays resulting from the $100,000 rule compromised this effort: Such reports “caught the attention of the White House, which is now monitoring Lewandowski’s hours and, according to the administration official, complaining about how difficult Noem can be to reach.”

This month, Terris reports, Noem and Lewandowski were summoned to the Oval Office by the president regarding “concerns about their management style.” An administration official said Trump was particularly “mad” about Lewandowski’s inability to “get along with anybody.”

They held onto their jobs despite that meeting, and so Lewandowski’s grip on DHS persists for the time being—for at least however many days he claims are left in his 130-day yearly limit.

Republicans are turning the heat back up on the Trump administration for its handling of the Epstein files.

Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie torched FBI Director Kash Patel over the weekend after he caught the bureau chief off guard on information that Patel should have already been privy to.

“I told Director Kash Patel that the FBI has names of 20 men to whom Jeffrey Epstein trafficked women and girls,” Massie wrote on X. “This basic fact seemed to surprise him. Why?

“Is the FBI withholding those names to protect the President’s rich and powerful friends?” Massie continued, before demanding that the administration “release the Epstein files.”

Massie has been fighting for the release of more documents related to the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, the deceased pedophilic sex trafficker with connections to the rich and powerful, including President Donald Trump.

“I believe that Trump is trying to protect rich and powerful people who are his friends, and that is why this material is not getting released,” Massie told CNN last week.

Even Patel ferociously argued for the total release of the Epstein files—before he formally entered the Trump administration. Months before Patel’s name was floated to run the bureau, Patel had told podcaster Benny Johnson that he believed the documents were being shielded from public view because of “who’s on that list.” During his confirmation hearing, the 45-year-old swore there would be “no stone left unturned” in the quest to make the Epstein files completely transparent.

But it all came to a head during a heated House Oversight Hearing Wednesday, when members of the lower chamber forced the bureau chief to confront the incongruencies between his prior stances and his recent lagging actions.

“This spring, you ordered hundreds of agents to pore over all of the Epstein files, but not to look for more clues about the money network, or the network of human traffickers,” said Representative Jamie Raskin. “You pulled these agents from their regular counterterrorism or drug trafficking duties to work around the clock—some of them sleeping at their desks—to conduct a frantic search to make sure Donald Trump’s name and image were flagged and redacted wherever they appeared.”

Raskin then highlighted a July memo from the bureau, in which Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi determined “no further disclosure” regarding the Epstein files and the FBI’s investigation “would be necessary or appropriate.”

President Trump, a slumlord at heart, is quietly halting enforcement of the Fair Housing Act, a massive piece of civil rights legislation that made it illegal to deny housing to someone based on their race, gender, religion, disability, or familial status.

Whistleblowers at the Housing and Urban Development’s fair housing office told The New York Times that Trump officials have made it harder for them to investigate and prosecute landlords and real estate agents who don’t abide by the guidelines of the Fair Housing Act. One HUD memo from a Trump appointee told employees to abandon “tenuous theories of discrimination” and that any research or content that was “contrary to administration policy” would be cut out. Lawyers have also reportedly been blocked from communicating with certain clients without prior approval from the Trump administration.

“I never thought I would be in this position,” said fair housing lawyer Paul Osadebe, who was informed he’d soon be reassigned. “We have people who are trying to destroy a baseline that people relied on.”

HUD has only made four charges of discrimination since Trump took office. It usually has 35 per year. The fair housing office has been slashed heavily by DOGE cuts, with only six lawyers remaining and another staff reduction coming on October 5. The disdain for HUD’s fair housing arm makes it clear that the Trump administration sees it as some DEI excess and not an incredibly important watchdog for Americans everywhere.

“With one email, the entire process was shut down,” former fair housing enforcement director Jacy Gaige told the Times. “It essentially stopped the settlement process, which is time sensitive because complainants and respondents come to an agreement about what they want to do to resolve a case. And often that is driven by specific deadlines that are occurring in people’s lives.”

Meanwhile, the few lawyers still left at HUD are drawing in urgent requests for support, especially from women who file complaints under the Violence Against Women Act.

“These are life and death requests,” said Osadebe. “These women are legitimately in mortal danger, and often without the government stepping in, nothing will be done.… This is a deliberate plan, and it’s about shutting down fair housing.”

Trump’s HUD spokeswoman, Kasey Lovett, has dismissed this narrative as “patently false” and blamed the stagnation in the fair housing office on the “deeply inefficient case system” of the Biden administration.

The Pentagon’s latest round of press restrictions go too far, according to the president.

Donald Trump criticized the War Department while en route to Charlie Kirk’s memorial service Sunday, scolding the defense agency for forbidding reporters from publishing “unauthorized” reports—even if they’re founded on nonclassified information.

“Should the Pentagon be part of deciding what reporters can report on?” a reporter asked.

“No, I don’t think so,” Trump responded, steps away from Marine One. “Nothing stops reporters. You know that.”

Unfortunately, a government’s white-knuckled control on the flow of information does stop reporters from disseminating information. Under War Secretary Pete Hegseth’s new rules, journalists are required to pledge that they would not report on anything from the department that had not been approved for official release. The new policy, announced Friday, would have journalists either report government-sponsored propaganda or have their press credentials revoked.

But even those inside the Pentagon are not on board with Hegseth’s Orwellian scheme. By Monday, three Pentagon officials had already decried the initiative, with one insider telling The Intercept that the rules were a “mockery of American ideals.”

“The idea they want editorial control over the press is something I expect from a banana republic, not the United States,” the same official told The Intercept.

Representatives for America’s media institutions, meanwhile, came out in full force against the restrictions.

“This is a direct assault on independent journalism at the very place where independent scrutiny matters most: the U.S. military,” National Press Club president Mike Balsamo said in a statement. “If the news about our military must first be approved by the government, then the public is no longer getting independent reporting. It is getting only what officials want them to see. That should alarm every American.”

For months, paranoia in the Pentagon has swelled while Hegseth’s inner circle has continued to shrink. This latest act of censorship is another step in Hegesth’s long journey to rein in his department. So far during the Fox News star’s short tenure atop the military agency, the Pentagon has experienced several astounding leaks that have rattled the Trump administration and its credibility on the international stage.

Those include instances in which The Atlantic’s editor in chief was invited into a Signal group chat between multiple Trump officials where they discussed real-time updates to a U.S. airstrike in Yemen, and another eyebrow-raising situation in which Hegesth intervened in U.S. foreign policy by suspending an aid shipment to Ukraine without notifying anyone—including the president.

President Donald Trump delivered incoherent remarks as he departed for the memorial of Charlie Kirk, claiming the event would be a “time of whatever.”

Trump told reporters outside the White House that he was going to “celebrate the life of a great man today. Really a great man. He’s a young man, but a great man.”

“And we look forward to it. It really is,” Trump continued confusedly. “We want to look at it as a time of healing, a time of whatever.”

Trump has struggled to convey sincere sorrow over Kirk’s death. Just days after his right-wing ally was fatally shot in Utah, Trump repeatedly responded to questions about Kirk by plugging his own plans to add a $200 million ballroom to the White House.

The president also reportedly missed a September 15 vigil for Kirk at the Kennedy Center in favor of going golfing.

True to his word, Trump used the “time of healing” for whatever. The president spent most of his address at Kirk’s memorial complaining about his personal grievances, and even contradicted remarks from Kirk’s widow by promising to enact more political violence and retribution against his administration’s perceived enemies.

A new Forbes report reveals that the Trump family has profited enormously from the presidency, doubling its fortune to a total of about $10 billion.

For Donald Trump, the year of his White House comeback has also been “the most lucrative year of his life,” with the president raking in $3 billion, two-thirds of which came from cryptocurrency—including his meme coin and World Liberty Financial, a crypto company started by his family and that of Steve Witkoff, his Middle East envoy.

World Liberty is notably at the center of a scandal, as The New York Times revealed last week. In May, the firm secured a $2 billion investment from an Emirati royal who just  happens to control a company that—per a deal with the United Arab Emirates that was announced two weeks later, and which Witkoff helped negotiate—will receive precious AI computer chips from the U.S. government.

Trump’s second son, Eric Trump, has seen his wealth balloon from $40 million last year to an estimated $750 million, in large part thanks to crypto. His older brother, Don Jr., is worth $500 million, compared to $50 million last year, having also cashed in on crypto and “the anti-woke economy,” among other ventures. The president’s youngest son, Barron Trump, is worth $150 million at 19 years old—again, largely from crypto.

Melania Trump, Forbes reports, has profited in both “typical First Lady ways (books, speeches, a documentary)” and “unquestionably Trumpian ways.” The latter category includes her own meme coin, $MELANIA—whose inauguration-eve launch was quite a shady affair: A group of crypto traders took in nearly $100 million by buying $MELANIA minutes before it was announced, then off-loading most of their holdings when its value then spiked.

The president’s daughter Ivanka is worth an estimated $100 million, and her husband, Jared Kushner, is now a billionaire, with a major contributor being a private equity firm he founded the same month Trump left the White House in 2021. Kushner was a senior adviser in the first Trump administration, and has since relied on relationships he built during his tenure to court investors.

Across the board, according to Forbes, the president’s family has doubled its net worth since the 2024 election.

President Donald Trump appeared to feign ignorance over the weekend about shutting down a bribery investigation into White House border czar Tom Homan.

Speaking to reporters Saturday, Trump was asked about a MSNBC report that the Department of Justice had dropped an investigation into Homan, after he was allegedly caught on camera accepting $50,000 in cash payments from undercover FBI agents posing as business executives in return for favorable contracts.

“Did you see the reporting on Tom Homan—” one reporter began. 

“No, I haven’t,” Trump interrupted.

The typically verbose Trump kept quiet about the latest allegations against his border czar—and his administration’s role in covering it up. 

Homan was allegedly caught accepting payments during a September 2024 meeting with undercover agents in Texas, promising that if Trump won, he could ensure favorable contracts for border enforcement. In recent weeks, Trump appointees at the Department of Justice have reportedly shuttered the investigation into Homan.

In a statement to MSNBC, FBI Director Kash Patel and deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche claimed the previous administration’s probe had found “no credible evidence of any criminal wrongdoing.” White House deputy Press Secretary Abigail Jackson claimed it was a “blatantly political investigation” and that Homan was responsible for awarding contracts under the current Trump administration. Homan had previously served as the acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during Trump’s first administration.  

President Trump plans to “save” TikTok by handing it over to America’s oligarchs. 

A senior White House official confirmed Monday that ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, plans to move an 80 percent stake of its company to America’s richest, most powerful men. ByteDance will create a separate, American copy of its infamous algorithm to lease to a new group spearheaded by Marc Andreessen’s Andreessen Horowitz, Larry Ellison’s Oracle, and the private equity firm Silver Lake. Ellison and Oracle will then control U.S. user data and be able to shape the algorithm as they see fit. 

“The algorithm will be retrained from the ground up and protected by Oracle to ensure Americans’ data is safeguarded and foreign influence is removed,” a senior official told Fox News.

Trump, who has floated banning and saving TikTok multiple times now, has given the men 120 days to finalize a deal. On Sunday, the president also confirmed that Dell Technologies’ Michael Dell and conservative media moguls Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch will also likely be involved in the deal.

The involvement of conservative billionaires and technocrats in the deal has raised valid concerns over the future of free speech. Conservatives are on the record blaming TikTok, for example, for the fact that the overwhelming majority of young Americans are opposed to Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Writing for Bari Weiss’s Zionist news site The Free Press, former Republican representative and current Palantir “head of defense” Mike Gallagher outright blamed TikTok’s algorithm for making young people “support Hamas.”    

Gallagher isn’t alone. In fact, his position is identical to the rest of the GOP’s.

“Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites, it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts,” Senator Mitt Romney said during a panel in May of last year. “So I’d note that’s of real interest, and the president will get the chance to make action in that regard.”

Now, that algorithm—and your data— will be retrained and refiltered by Oracle and by Ellison, who has a very close relationship with the Israel Defense Forces and believes that “there is no greater honor” than supporting Israel.

Charlie Kirk’s memorial was apparently just another opportunity for the president to espouse his typical talking points.

The Sunday service intended to honor Kirk’s legacy featured his family, friends, and crucial members of the Trump administration, from Vice President JD Vance to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Speaking before an arena of mourners, some of the country’s most high-profile Republicans painted Kirk as a martyr for the conservative movement, who they credited with transforming contemporary American youth politics.

But Donald Trump’s turn behind the lectern was a remarkable divergence from the lineup. While the president used some of his time allotment to heap praise onto Kirk, he also leveraged the name and memory of one of the GOP’s biggest firebrands to bolster his typical diatribe.

For more than 40 minutes, Trump lamented over late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel, aired the supposed success of his economic tariff plan, damned the rate of autism in America, and even negated the message of Kirk’s widow by promising to enact more political violence and retribution against his administration’s perceived enemies.

“Just like Charlie and Erika made Turning Point hot, we are looking at a country that has a chance to attain a level like never before—tariffs are making us rich again, richer than anybody ever thought was possible,” Trump said. “And the only ones challenging them are people that hate our country, or foreign countries that are paying a price.”

“The election was big, but the tariffs—because of the election—came in.”

Trump also used some of his air time to talk about his planned deployment of the National Guard to Chicago, promising the stadium that he would bring the hard fist of the White House to several of the country’s biggest cities.

“I’m so proud of Washington, D.C., and now we’re going to Memphis, and we’ll get that one straightened out fast, and then we’re going into some others, but we’re going to go do Chicago, and we’re going to have Charlie very much in mind when we go into Chicago,” Trump told the roaring crowd.