CNN’s Elie Honig Says Tom Homan May Not Have Committed a Crime
CNN’s Elie Honig explained on Monday how Trump Border Czar Tom Homan could get off without a conviction and perhaps even prosecution even without the president’s protection.
Over the weekend, MSNBC dropped a bombshell report about how FBI agents posing as businessmen had recorded Homan accepting $50,000 in cash in exchange for his efforts to get the federal government to give their supposed business contracts. The Department of Justice allegedly dropped the investigation into Homan after Donald Trump took office.
Honig weighed in on the case after anchor Sara Sidner asked, “When does a bribe become a bribe? And why is this case closed?”:
So first of all, free legal advice for everybody, do not accept $50,000 in a bag just as a general rule. Now my prosecutorial antenna are definitely up at this scenario, but it’s also important to understand the bribery laws can be confusing, and at times confounding. So one of the potential issues here is it’s not necessarily a crime for a person to take a bribe, a benefit, On the promise of, “If I get into office, I will do something for you. “There’s some very confounding law — I don’t like it, but that exists out there — that says you have to wait until the person gets in office.
The other complication is the exchange in a bribe is some benefit, cash, for an official act. And the Supreme Court just in 2017 said that an official act cannot just be setting people up with access, getting people meetings, getting people in the door. It has to be something specific like casting a vote in a certain direction. And so you need to — and by the way, if you don’t like that decision, it was unanimous, so Ruth Bader Ginsburg agreed with Clarence Thomas in that one, so I don’t like it, but it has nothing to do with partisanship — so those are some of the nuances that we need to know details of, and that prosecutors would be doing a deep dive on.
Later, Honig remarked that “Congress has some work to do here,” and restated that while the news isn’t “good for” Homan, what he did is “not necessarily a crime.”
Watch above via CNN.
