The Quiet Parts, Quite Out Loud

Trump stepped in it bigly over the weekend, and his Border Czar also now stinks of corruption.

Photo of Border Czar Tom Homan by Andrew Harnik / Getty Images

Trump is out there shooting people on Fifth Avenue, as he once famously declared he could with zero consequence. At least he’s doing so figuratively, and so far the GOP-controlled Congress and captured Supreme Court are letting him get away with it.

But perhaps the American public ultimately won’t. Two scandals involving the Justice Department broke this weekend, each of which would have ended a different presidency. It’s a dangerous indication of how far we’ve fallen in such a short time; these were only two stories out of several this weekend competing for our frayed mental bandwidth.

I want to focus on these two scandals today because they demonstrate how Trump is actually hitting major roadblocks on his prosecutorial revenge tour, and how the Justice Department is not holding up well, while losing all sense of legitimacy. If this continues, it will carry significant repercussions for Trump’s entire fascist agenda.

Sliding into her DMs

On Saturday, Trump posted on Truth Social what appeared to be a DM he had meant to send to Attorney General Pam Bondi. It was even addressed to her directly.

“Pam,” he wrote, “I have reviewed over 30 statements and posts” and complained that they accused him of repeating the “same old story as last time, all talk, no action.”

Trump’s frustration is palpable and worth parsing. “Nothing is being done,” he further wrote. “What about Comey, Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, Leticia???”

Trump pressed Bondi to act. “We can’t delay any longer. It’s killing our reputation and credibility. They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!)” he added. He concluded, “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED NOW!!!”

Trump had recently forced out the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Erik Siebert. This was a Republican whom Trump himself had nominated to that position. Siebert was in charge of the James and Comey investigations, but had found no reason to prosecute either of them. As he stated plainly in his post, Trump wants Siebert (a “Woke RINO”) replaced with a Trump loyalist—the “Lindsey” in his tweet who “likes” Bondi “a lot.”

First, we need to talk about how this post sure seemed like a DM to Bondi, and not a social media missive.

To my knowledge, Trump has never begun a post using a direct report’s first name. And as Chris Geidner noted in his newsletter, the curious post went up, then came down after it was reported by Kyle Cheney of Politico. Then for some reason it went back up again, adding only Lindsey Halligan’s last name.

Perhaps Trump, or one of his aides, realized that screengrabs of the DM were already out there and that deleting the post completely would only confirm that this was an embarrassing mistake. Geidner observed wryly,

An hour later, suggesting a clean-up move after the prior two posts, Trump posted a third time to say that Bondi is “doing a GREAT job” and that he “will be nominating“ Halligan, another of his former personal lawyers, to be the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.

Geidner reminded us that under federal law, Trump doesn’t actually have the power to appoint Halligan, who is reportedly an insurance claims lawyer in Florida. His choices are to 1) name her to the position for 120 days, 2) have the First Assistant in the office take over, or 3) name certain people within the Justice Department (who do not include Halligan) to be acting U.S. Attorney.

Trump ran into this problem with Alina Habba in New Jersey already—another of Trump’s personal attorneys whose primary qualifications appear to be her looks and her loyalty. So you’d think he’d have learned his lesson. But sadly, Trump simply doesn’t care if none of Habba’s actions are actually considered legal and binding by courts in that district. He’d prefer to fight the courts on this and allow chaos to continue to unfold.

On seeing Trump’s ill-considered DM/post, Hillary Clinton remarked, “Imagine if Richard Nixon had just tweeted out the Watergate scandal rather than putting it on secret tapes. That’s what this is.”

On this she is spot on, as usual. The Justice Department is supposed to be independent of the White House and any political meddling. Nixon’s secret Watergate tapes were so damning because they revealed that he was the one who ordered a halt to the probe into the break-in at the DNC headquarters. Nixon had his finger in the investigation pie, and that was enough to bring him down.

Yet here is Trump, ordering his AG, in what seems was likely intended as a private DM, to go after his opponents, replace the U.S. Attorney on the case with a loyalist, and ensure a prosecution of his political enemies no matter what.

Clinton no doubt remembers when the GOP lost their collective minds after her husband Bill met for some 20 minutes on the tarmac with then Attorney General Loretta Lynch in 2016. Bill Clinton wasn’t even president at the time, and there is no evidence anything inappropriate was discussed, but it was considered a scandal of massive proportions.

If the GOP-controlled Congress held true to their oaths, they would vote to impeach Trump for this communication to Bondi, and they would remove him from office. That of course is a pipe dream because they do not honor their oaths and are spineless, hypocritical sycophants. It remains up to the voters now to punish them for their cowardice in the 2026 midterms.

Tom “Bag o’ Cash” Homan

The second Justice Department scandal reads like a bad script, one Hollywood producers would roundly reject as too on the nose.

MSNBC reported that, before being named Border Czar by Trump, Tom Homan was caught on film accepting $50,000 in cash inside a paper bag, while promising to steer contracts toward the bribers after he was in office.

I don’t know what is more unintentionally funny about this, the fact that he accepted that much cash inside a bag from the CAVA restaurant chain in the parking lot like a two-bit mobster, or that the people handing him the money were actually undercover FBI agents.

Homan wasn’t even the original target of this sting. The original subject of the investigation was someone else who had volunteered that “Homan was soliciting payments in exchange for awarding contracts should Trump win the presidential election.” In other words, Homan wasn’t exactly keeping this a secret.

As reported by MSNBC,

Undercover FBI agents posing as contractors communicated and met several times last summer with a business colleague who introduced them to Homan, and with Homan himself, who indicated he would facilitate securing contracts for them in exchange for money once he was in office, according to documents and the people familiar with the case.

On Sept. 20, 2024, with hidden cameras recording the scene at a meeting spot in Texas, Homan accepted $50,000 in bills, according to an internal summary of the case and sources.

They could have charged him then and there but decided to wait until Homan was in office and went to fulfill his end of the bargain. Justice officials were considering four potential criminal charges: conspiracy, bribery and two kinds of fraud.

The Public Integrity Section agreed to join the case in late November 2024. But then Trump’s former personal attorney and lackey at the Justice Department, Emil Bove, who also forced prosecutors to drop the federal case against NYC Mayor Eric Adams, got involved. Bove indicated that he didn’t support the investigation moving forward.

FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a joint statement, “This matter originated under the previous administration and was subjected to a full review by FBI agents and Justice Department prosecutors. They found no credible evidence of any criminal wrongdoing.”

No credible evidence? How can you do better than a videotape of Homan accepting a bag full of cash in a parking lot from undercover FBI undercover agents?! The FBI is fast revealing itself to be a joke—and willing to admit so out loud.

It’s notable that Homan wasn’t the original target at all. Rather, he was offered up as someone willing to accept bribes by the person the FBI was originally investigating. Nevertheless, White House Deputy Press Secretary Abigail Jackson decried the matter as a “blatantly political investigation” (wrong) that “found no evidence of illegal activity” (wrong again) and “is yet another example of how the Biden Department of Justice was using it’s [sic] resources to target President Trump’s allies rather than investigate real criminals.” (Narrator: Homan is a real criminal based on the video evidence.)

We should be clear-eyed. Any real accountability for Homan will have to wait, once again, until at least the House is in the hands of the Democrats. It’s yet one more reason next year’s midterms are so crucial. We must do all we can to ensure they proceed fairly and that we prevail in overwhelming and incontrovertible numbers.

Until then, we can take some satisfaction in the notion that Homan is tainted goods and now a big liability for the White House. When asked about Homan, Trump pretended he hadn’t heard the news. He won’t be able to keep pretending.

Democrats have seized upon Homan’s illegal actions to flip the script. My favorite take was from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) who reposted the news about Homan asking, “Who’s the illegal now?”

Meanwhile, MAGA lickspittle Megyn Kelly encapsulated the right’s utter nihilism in her response. “We do not care,” Kelly declared, adding “Don’t bother [Homan because] he’s a national treasure.”

More like a national embarrassment, but do keep saying the quiet part aloud and tying yourself to sinking ships.

A flat tire on the fascist bus

The two scandals highlight the problems the Trump regime now faces in carrying out its autocratic agenda.

For starters, the Department of Justice has been losing its best people for months, and that is continuing apace. Many are refusing to go along with Trump’s agenda of vendettas and have resigned or been forced out. Shortly after the news broke about Erik Siebert’s departure as U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, following his own refusal to prosecute either James or Comey, the same story is playing out in Maryland. There, U.S. Attorney Kelly Hayes is facing pressure to bring charges against Trump enemy Adam Schiff. But per the New York Times, she won’t do so if the facts don’t support it:

Ms. Hayes, a career prosecutor who has spent more than a decade in that office, is leading inquiries into two other vocal critics of Mr. Trump: Mr. Schiff, who has been accused of mortgage fraud by Mr. Trump’s allies; and John R. Bolton, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, who is facing scrutiny over allegations of mishandling classified information.

Recently, Ms. Hayes told associates that she was under no illusions of the pressure she would face if she refused to bring a case she believed to be unsupported by evidence, as Mr. Siebert did, according to people with knowledge of those conversations. And while she signed off last month on asking for a warrant to search Mr. Bolton’s home in Bethesda, Md., she has indicated that she would not bring charges against Mr. Schiff unless her team discovered evidence to support them.

Trump’s response has been to push these career prosecutors out and put his loyalists in. But as he’s discovering with Alina Habba, and presumably soon will with Lindsey Halligan, the law stands in his way. And there are few qualified people left within the Department who will do his bidding without question and willingly violate their ethical and professional standards.

The Justice Department, as a consequence, is losing not only experienced people but what remaining credibility it has with the federal courts and grand juries. The frustration this is causing Trump is now evident, at least based on his DM/post to Pam Bondi. Things are not moving forward as he wants, so he’s openly putting his finger on the scale.

I must say, the level of incompetence it takes to reveal your own corruption so plainly to the world is breathtaking. It’s right up there with the brazen stupidity of accepting a bag full of cash from “business executives” in a parking lot. Nothing to see here! And perhaps, with the daily flood of misdeeds served up by the White House, the press will simply move on to the next story.

But even if it does, this will leave a familiar bad taste with voters. We’ve seen this claim of “no evidence to support an investigation” play out recently in the Epstein matter when a hapless Director Patel recently testified under oath before Congress. There, as I wrote about on Friday, he claimed that the world’s most famous sex trafficker, whose accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell is in prison for sex trafficking, actually never trafficked any girls to anyone but himself.

No one believes that. Not even most of MAGA.

With its clumsy cover ups and insulting takes, the FBI is fast becoming Federal Bullshit, Inc. And that matters a great deal if Trump wants to weaponize law enforcement against his political opponents. As Greg Sargent of The New Republic observed,

All this is grist for the bigger idea that Trump is a politically weak and ineffectual president who’s simultaneously consolidating autocratic power in areas where he has more flexibility to do so. As Jonathan Bernstein notes, Trump’s record in lower courts is terrible, which is part of a larger dynamic in which he constantly loses on many fronts where he faces real opposition.

Going forward, Homan shouldn’t be able to appear on any show outside right-wing media without being asked about why he accepted a bag full of money in a parking lot and made corrupt promises to undercover FBI agents. And anyone targeted by the regime for charges should put Trump’s directive to Bondi front and center in an immediate motion to dismiss for prosecutorial misconduct.

While such motions are admittedly usually not winners, we’ve also never had this kind of evidence of misconduct so plainly laid out. The more people who understand the rank corruption and transparently vindictive agenda of Trump’s Justice Department, the less likely they will agree to indict or convict anyone targeted by it.

That makes our job as members of the public clear: to ensure as many citizens, and thus potential jurors, understand the deep corruption of the justice system so that they push back when provided an opportunity to do so.