Trump Plays Dumb About Bribery Accusations Against His Border Czar

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.

President Donald Trump doubled down Monday on his threat to send Attorney General Pam Bondi after his political enemies.

Speaking to the press on Air Force One, Trump was asked whom he wanted Attorney General Pam Bondi to “focus” on prosecuting.

“Everybody, really,” Trump said.

“There are a lot of crooked people that were here before me. And people that almost destroyed our country,” he said. “If I didn’t win this election, our country would be destroyed.”

But Trump had no problem naming names in a Truth Social post Saturday addressed to Bondi, pressuring the attorney general to get to work prosecuting his political enemies, or risk “killing our reputation and credibility.”

“Pam: I have reviewed over 30 statements and posts saying that, essentially, ‘same old story as last time, all talk, no action. Nothing is being done. What about Comey, Adam “Shifty” Schiff, Leticia? ? ? They’re all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done,’” he wrote.

Trump also celebrated the resignation of Erik Siebert, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, whom Trump officials had pressured to seek an indictment against New York Attorney General Letitia James.

Investigators have yet to produce a shred of evidence that James falsified bank documents to secure favorable terms on a mortgage for her Virginia home. Two Trump stooges, Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte and Ed Martin, the head of the DOJ’s Working Weaponization Group, reportedly urged Siebert to seek an indictment against James at Trump’s direction. When federal prosecutors declined, Pulte reportedly encouraged Trump to fire Siebert and have him replaced with someone else. On Friday, Trump was ready to drop the ax.

Trump called Siebert “A Woke RINO, who was never going to do his job” in his Saturday post and claimed that he’d had Siebert fired.

“Lindsey is a really good lawyer, and likes you, a lot,” Trump continued. He later reposted this rant, clarifying that he was writing about Lindsey Halligan, his personal attorney who now serves as special assistant to the president. Politico legal reporter Kyle Cheney suggested that Trump hoped to replace Siebert with Halligan to pursue his supposedly “GREAT case” against James.

Maggie Cleary, a new addition to the Justice Department’s Criminal Division who claims to have been wrongly accused of participating in the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, has been named acting head of the U.S. Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.

Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser, delivered a deranged speech at the Sunday memorial service for Charlie Kirk in Arizona.

MAGA “patriots,” Miller claimed, have inherited a civilizing mission from their ancestors. To continue this mission, save humanity, and continue the legacy of Kirk, he said, they must vanquish the “forces of darkness,” their political opponents.

At the beginning of his remarks, Miller said Kirk’s widow, Erika, reminds him of a “famous expression”: “The storm whispers to the warrior that, ‘You cannot withstand my strength.’ And the warrior whispers back, ‘I am the storm.’”

“Erika is the storm,” Miller declared. “We are the storm. And our enemies cannot comprehend our strength, our determination, our resolve, our passion.

“Our lineage and our legacy hails back to Athens, to Rome, to Philadelphia, to Monticello,” Miller continued. “Our ancestors built the cities. They produced the art and architecture. They built the industry,” he said, pulling “us out of the caves and the darkness into the light.

“We built the world that we inhabit now, generation by generation, and we will defend this world,” he later added.

Addressing “the forces of wickedness and evil,” Miller said: “You have nothing. You are nothing. You are wickedness, you are jealousy, you are envy, you are hatred. You are nothing. You can build nothing. You can produce nothing. You can create nothing. We are the ones who build. We are the ones who create. We are the ones who lift up humanity.

“You have no idea the dragon you have awakened,” he warned, as the MAGA movement will strive to “save this civilization, to save the West, to save this republic, because our children are strong, and our grandchildren will be strong, and our children’s children’s children will be strong. And what will you leave behind? Nothing, nothing.”

The speech was consistent with Miller’s white nationalist sympathies, penchant for unhinged rants against his political enemies, and apparent mission to use Kirk’s murder as a pretext for broader crackdowns. Last week, he vowed to avenge Kirk’s death by “go[ing] after the left-leaning organizations” that, he claimed, “are promoting violence in this country.”