Well, according to news reports and those good old reliable sources – reliable sources, the best kind as I recall from my days as a reporter – Thomas Homan, the man now heading the ICE machine for Trump, has a problem.
The allegation (real reporters, unlike this president, always qualify that a criminal charge is an allegation – the crime is alleged and nothing will change that unless and until a jury verdict) – the allegation is that Homan took $50,000 in return for a corrupt agreement to put in the FIX with the Trump administration.
The allegation is that he took the money and that it came in a paper bag. No kidding, in a paper bag, that proverbial paper bag.
It is the age old question in corrupt public life, did the cart come before the horse or…? Did the extortion produce the bribe – oh sorry the alleged bribe – or did the alleged bribe get there first? In a paper bag, really? (Oh right: Allegedly).
So this puts me in mind of the late Nick Accocella. Nick, an exceptional political reporter, who spent a lifetime around political life in Hudson County, a truly excepti0nal place in New Jersey where the only life is politics (Jersey City, Union City, Hoboken, Bayonne, West New York, North Bergen, Weehawken and like that).
Out to lunch with Nick one day he said this as it applied then, applies today and is something Homan should think about real hard right now:
“If it fit in a paper bag — it wan’t enough anyway.”
Peeling the Onion 