Trump’s Border Czar Accepted $50,000 in a Bag from Undercover Agents. Somehow, He’s Getting Away With It.

Anthony Ulasewicz died in 1997. He was 79 years old. On that day, we Watergate obsessives mourned. He was the underappreciated star of Sam Ervin’s special committee looking into the break-in, and general campaign of dirty tricks and sabotage that led up to, activities that entered the political lexicon as “ratfcking.” It was Ulasewicz's job to deliver hundreds of thousands of dollars in hush money to a variety of Watergate participants, most notably G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt.

He sent the audience in the hearing room into gales of laughter with his tales of carrying huge wads of cash in brown paper bags and leaving them on hotel ledges and airport station lockers. He even explained why he bought one of those change devices bus drivers use for coins because of all the pay phones he had to use during his rounds. It was the only sustained moment of levity in the endless and sorry recitation of unprecedented White House criminality.

So, therefore, over the weekend, my heart lightened when the spirit of Tony Ulasewicz walked again through the hallways of another corrupt and rancid White House. From MSNBC:

In an undercover operation last year, the FBI recorded Tom Homan, now the White House border czar, accepting $50,000 in cash after indicating he could help the agents—who were posing as business executives—win government contracts in a second Trump administration, according to multiple people familiar with the probe and internal documents reviewed by MSNBC.

... The federal investigation was launched in western Texas in the summer of 2024 after a subject in a separate investigation claimed Homan was soliciting payments in exchange for awarding contracts should Trump win the presidential election, according to an internal Justice Department summary of the probe reviewed by MSNBC and people familiar with the case. The U.S. Attorney’s office in the Western District of Texas, working with the FBI, asked the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section to join its ongoing probe “into the Border Czar and former Acting Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Tom Homan and others based on evidence of payment from FBI undercover agents in exchange for facilitating future contracts related to border enforcement.”

On September 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.

And how did Homan allegedly receive his cash? Inside a bag from a restaurant. And people wonder whatever happened to the classics.

As anyone would have expected, the new administration squashed the investigation into Homan and his bag o’ cash, offering a gust of hot air about the “Deep State” and some obvious—and painfully ironic—flummery in The New York Times about how President Biden “... was using its resources to target President Trump’s allies rather than investigate real criminals and the millions of illegal aliens who flooded our country.”

There are very few members of this administration more deserving of a rude comeuppance than Homan, an out of control bully-boy who likes to threaten mayors and deport sick children as though they were chemical waste. Bagmen used to be a lot more fun.