Tom Homan and the Case of the Missing Fifty Thousand

The Vice-President, it must be noted, graduated from Yale Law School, where presumably he learned something about what it takes to “violate a crime”—and how behavior that does not rise to the level of criminality can nonetheless be suspicious and blameworthy. The incoming Trump Administration was reportedly alerted to the investigation. It must have realized that a story this odiferous had a high likelihood of being leaked, yet it gave Homan a prominent role. It is hard to imagine another Administration in the post-Watergate era making that judgment—even if officials didn’t find Homan’s actions morally repugnant, they would avoid him out of self-preservation. But for the Trump team, with its high tolerance for embarrassment and supreme confidence in its impunity, there isn’t much that is off the table. So the Administration can brazen its way through self-serving deals that would have made its predecessors blanch: the gift of a luxury jet from Qatar; the various ventures into cryptocurrency, including a gala dinner for the biggest investors in the $TRUMP meme coin. A bag of cash pales by comparison.

The Stephanopoulos-Vance encounter was not the Administration’s first effort to shut down the Homan story. Shortly after MSNBC broke the news of the cash transfer, in late September, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told a reporter, “Well, Mr. Homan never took the fifty thousand dollars that you’re referring to, so you should get your facts straight.” The investigation, Leavitt asserted, had represented “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. You had F.B.I. 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.” Homan, she said, “did absolutely nothing wrong.”

On October 7th, at the Senate Judiciary Committee’s oversight hearing for Attorney General Pam Bondi, four Democratic senators—Sheldon Whitehouse, of Rhode Island; Mazie Hirono, of Hawaii; Alex Padilla, of California; and Peter Welch, of Vermont—also raised the matter of the missing fifty thousand. Bondi’s response was characteristically bristling and evasive; Whitehouse asked about the money seven times, to no avail. “You’re very concerned about money and people taking money and you rail against dark money yet you work with dark-money groups all the time,” Bondi told him. When Whitehouse asked Bondi if investigators had examined whether Homan reported the fifty thousand as taxable income, Bondi retorted, “Senator, I would be more concerned, if I were you when you talk about corruption and money, that . . . you pushed for legislation that would subsidize your wife’s company.” (Sandra Whitehouse, a marine biologist, has worked for an ocean-conservation group that receives federal funds for which her husband voted. The Senate Ethics Committee has dismissed two complaints on this subject.) The investigation into Homan “was resolved prior to my confirmation as Attorney General,” Bondi told Welch. “It’s not resolved. There’s fifty thousand dollars,” Welch responded. “Homan has it, or somebody has it. Do you have no interest in knowing where it is?” Bondi replied, “You’re not going to sit here and slander Tom Homan.”

Homan, for his part, has tried a couple of different defenses. “Look, I did nothing criminal. I did nothing illegal,” he told Laura Ingraham, of Fox News, in September. Ingraham didn’t press Homan about whether he’d taken the money, and he didn’t deny it. Appearing Wednesday evening on NewsNation, Homan was more definitive. “I didn’t take fifty thousand dollars from anybody,” he declared, and added a helping of self-pity. “There’s been hit pieces on me since I came back to this Administration,” he said. “What people don’t talk about is I took a significant, huge pay cut to come back and serve my nation, and I’m not enriching myself doing this job.”

The beauty of the Homan story is that its elements are so easily grasped: the undercover agents, the alleged dangling of contracts, the Cava bag, the missing cash. You don’t have to plow through the intricacies of international law or the economics of meme coins to understand that there is every indication that something very wrong happened, whether or not it amounted to a crime. To ask about this, again and again, is not slander, it is an obligation—of reporters, lawmakers, and the public. Because to let this episode slide—to allow it to be overtaken by the next outrage and the one to follow—would be to accept that no accountability is ever imposed on anyone in Trump’s orbit. Where’s the fifty thousand? ♦