Reporting from MS NOW shows the Trump administration knew current White House immigration advisor Tom Homan was under investigation for bribery before Trump submitted Homan’s name to Congress for approval.
In early January, a Justice Department lawyer passed an envelope with news of Homan’s “bombshell” crookery, according to two people briefed on the meeting. The official who received the information, Trump’s personal attorney Emil Bove “closed his eyes and grimaced, according to two people briefed on the meeting,” reports Pulitzer Prize-winning author and MS NOW contributor Carol Leonnig,
Giving Bove the memo was an unprecedented move, Leonnig told "All In" guest host Jason Johnson, but a small group of career lawyers at the Justice Department felt “an urgency to share this sensitive information with the president-elect's team as soon as possible.”
Not that the team appeared to care, said Leonnig. After the FBI’s criminal bribery probe into Homan came to light, the Trump team didn't quietly cut him loose. It's not even clear what Bove did with the information DOJ officials gave him about Homan. Instead, Homan got both the job and the security clearance it required, and Trump's FBI director quietly closed the bureau's criminal bribery probe into Homan, despite Homan never denying taking a paper bag full of cash proffered by agents in a sting. And Trump would later elevate Bove to a U.S. Circuit Court judgeship.
“Donald Trump balked at the notion that all other presidents had followed before him of submitting names for these FBI background checks,” Leonnig told Johnson. “If the president-elect had done that the way normal people do, he would have gotten the alert and the benefit of the FBI’s research, and known that the guy he was considering for a very senior law enforcement post was indeed under criminal investigation for potentially soliciting bribes, and had been recorded accepting $50,000 in cash in a bag.”
Johnson pointed out that many federal jobs vet employees so thoroughly that even a candidate’s debt-to-income ratio can boot them from the running because of the threat their financial hunger represents to taxpayers.
“That's … why DOJ officials believed there was no way [Homan] was going to get a security clearance, and that he would be suitable for such a job, Leonnig said. “How could he have access to some of the government's most important secrets and sensitive information if he was a person who might be willing to take money in exchange for things of value? Could a foreign adversary approach him and say, ‘let me give you $100,000 in a Chipotle bag?’”
During his first term, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner did not initially receive a top-secret security clearance, based on the fact that Kushner had “made a lot of outreach to foreign sovereign wealth funds for financing, because he was in dire financial straits and very much in the red on a very large mortgage," per Leonnig.
“And so, the worry as described by those security officials was that [Kushner] was very manipulable," she said. "That was their word: manipulable. And in this instance, DOJ officials believed that Homan had already illustrated he was willing to take cash in appearing to promise to steer contracts. What else might he be willing to do?”
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