Justice Dept. Opens Inquiry Into Corey Lewandowski
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The details of the inquiry remain unclear, but it is one of the rare instances in which a Trump ally or appointee has been investigated for potential wrongdoing during the president’s second term.
By Glenn ThrushTyler Pager and Nicholas Nehamas Oct. 22, 2026 The Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into Corey Lewandowski over accusations that he profited from his role as a top adviser to the Department of Homeland Security, according to two officials with knowledge of the situation.
The inquiry, one of the rare instances in which an ally or appointee of President Trump’s has been investigated for potential wrongdoing during his second term, was initiated in response to a referral from the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general, the officials said.
It was not immediately clear what actions were under investigation.
Late Thursday, Mr. Trump told reporters at the White House that he had heard about the investigation but did not know the details.
He did not, however, offer words of support or even consolation to his longtime ally. He added that he viewed the potential theft of public funds as a personal affront.
“I want my people to be honest, and if they are not going to be honest they have to be prosecuted,” he said. “If people are not honest, they’re stealing from me.”
Any dishonest people, he added, would be handled by “my D.O.J.”
A lawyer for Mr. Lewandowski denied suggestions that he had done anything improper or illegal. “Mr. Lewandowski has not been contacted by the Justice Department regarding any investigation, and he denies any wrongdoing when he was proudly serving his country in a voluntary capacity,” the lawyer, Adam Trigg, said in a statement.
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment. Its office of the inspector general declined to comment, saying it typically did not “confirm or deny the existence of an investigation, to preserve our independence.”
The Wall Street Journal earlier reported news of the inquiry.
Mr. Lewandowski, who served as Mr. Trump’s first campaign manager a decade ago, joined the department early last year in what was supposed to be a limited, part-time role. He worked closely with Kristi Noem, the former homeland security secretary, but left after she was abruptly forced out in March, as concerns grew about his conduct.
He wielded power far beyond the scope of his role as an unpaid adviser, serving as Ms. Noem’s top aide and confidant. From his perch, he built an expansive portfolio in which he had wide influence over personnel, contracts and department operations.
He often hosted meetings in Ms. Noem’s office without her present, grilling agency officials and issuing orders.
In the lead-up to his departure, homeland security officials had expressed worries that Mr. Lewandowski was trying to enrich himself. Those complaints ultimately reached the White House, where Mr. Lewandowski’s fiery personality and penchant for political intrigue already alienated some top Trump advisers.
His focus on contracts drew particular attention from top homeland security officials.
As secretary, Ms. Noem had enacted a policy requiring that she approve all contracts over $100,000, a move the agency said was intended to reduce wasteful spending.
Some of those approvals were reviewed by Mr. Lewandowski, who signed memos greenlighting the spending alongside Ms. Noem. He included his title, “chief adviser to S1,” a reference to the homeland security secretary, according to documents seen by The New York Times and people familiar with his role.
The approval process slowed down critical spending, including for airport security and disaster relief, The Times previously reported. Some White House officials were furious at the slow handling of contracts, fielding complaints from local leaders about their inability to get disaster assistance.
Mr. Lewandowski also flexed vast influence over Mr. Trump’s efforts to detain and deport millions of immigrants. He helped elevate Gregory Bovino, a midlevel leader of the U.S. Border Patrol, to a senior position commanding militarized deportation raids across the United States.
Mr. Bovino was forced out earlier this year after agents under his supervision killed two protesters in Minneapolis during an aggressive immigration sweep.
The catalyst for Ms. Noem’s departure appeared to be her answers during two congressional hearings, particularly her statements that Mr. Trump had approved of tens of millions of dollars of government ads in which she was prominently featured. He later denied her account.
After Ms. Noem left the Department of Homeland Security, she became a special envoy for Western Hemisphere security at the State Department. But her term was not renewed when it ended in September. She now holds a lower-profile role as a senior adviser at the State Department.
In the last hours of Ms. Noem’s tenure, her agency delivered a windfall to one of her political donors by buying five airplanes from the man’s firm at a substantial markup.
The Department of Homeland Security agreed to pay the donor’s firm $108 million for a Boeing 737 airliner that had been converted into a huge private jet, complete with a stand-up bar, two bedrooms, marble showers and a table covered in manta ray skin.
The firm, Daedalus Aviation Corporation, had bought the same plane a few months earlier from a seller who had asked for less than $90 million, according to documents reviewed by The Times.
A Daedalus spokesman said in a statement that the company was “not aware of any criminal investigation regarding our company or our people, nor any legitimate cause for there to be such an investigation.”
Few people in Mr. Trump’s inner circle have had quite as bumpy a ride as Mr. Lewandowski, whose motto as campaign manager — “Let Trump be Trump” — was far more enduring than his short stint running the campaign, which ended in June 2016, before the Republican National Convention.
Over the years, he has been accused of trying to bring a handgun (inside a laundry bag) into a congressional office building, roughing up a female reporter covering the 2016 campaign, mocking a 10-year-old immigrant with Down syndrome, and making unwanted sexual advances and lewd remarks to the wife of a Trump donor at a fund-raising event in Nevada in 2021.
He was later charged with misdemeanor battery in connection with that incident. He reached a plea agreement in which he admitted no wrongdoing, but paid a $1,000 fine and took eight hours of impulse-control counseling.
Alan Feuer, Maggie Haberman and Hamed Aleaziz contributed reporting.
Glenn Thrush covers the Department of Justice for The Times and has also written about gun violence, civil rights and conditions in the country’s jails and prisons.
Tyler Pager is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.
Nicholas Nehamas is a Washington correspondent for The Times, focusing on the Trump administration and its efforts to transform the federal government.
Trump Pushes to Evict the Press From the White House
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President Trump has talked about replacing the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room with an indoor swimming pool.
By Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan
Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan are White House reporters.
Oct. 20, 2026 Leer en español In late August, during one of Karoline Leavitt’s final meetings with President Trump in the Oval Office, he pitched her on an idea in front of several senior aides. He told her to move reporters out of the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room, which would effectively remove news organizations from the White House. It would be, he told her, her “last legacy.”
But the proposal never moved forward while she was there. The president had put the request to her several times over months, according to three people with knowledge of the discussions who were not authorized to speak publicly. Ms. Leavitt officially stepped down as White House press secretary on Aug. 27.
Mr. Trump has told aides he would prefer to bring back the indoor pool President Franklin D. Roosevelt added in 1933 as therapy for his polio-afflicted legs; President Richard Nixon later covered it over to make room for the news media. Journalists who are credentialed to cover the White House work out of a small office space connected to the press briefing room.
While moving the media out of the White House may be a relatively small debate considering Mr. Trump’s attacks on journalists more broadly, it would be highly symbolic. The proximity of the media to the seat of U.S. executive power has long been an acknowledgment of the importance of a free press in a constitutional democracy.
It would also be a decision that would be difficult to undo by future presidents.
make room for the briefing room.Credit...Bettman Archives/Getty Images
Mr. Trump has brought up the press-eviction idea before, dating to his first term, and he has never quite dropped it. A growing number of people around him favor the idea. Several close to him believe that moving the news media, most likely to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building across the street, may be the latest escalation in a remarkable series of moves against the news media that have already gone further than most of them expected.
As recently as Sept. 27, Mr. Trump shared a pair of images on Truth Social showing the briefing room as it is now, captioned “Fake News,” alongside another that shows the space reimagined as a gilded swimming pool, captioned “FDR Pool.”
The Wall Street Journal reported last month that Mr. Trump had repeatedly discussed moving the press corps out of the White House, and that his advisers had so far either offered pushback or waited for him to move on.
What has changed since Mr. Trump’s first term or even earlier this term is the staff around him. The president’s core team has shrunk from the already-tight unit that he brought into the White House last year. During earlier discussions, most of Mr. Trump’s senior aides agreed it served him better to keep the media nearby. But Mr. Trump has grown more enraged about his press coverage, and other advisers of growing influence have encouraged him to take drastic measures to punish journalists.
“America is rightly distrustful of the fake news media because they fabricate stories based off lies and sources who are not even privy to any type of information,” said Steven Cheung, the White House communications director. “All options remain on the table, and we will make an announcement when appropriate.”
During the 2016 Trump transition, Stephen K. Bannon, then the incoming chief strategist, suggested moving the press corps out of the West Wing, to a townhouse near Lafayette Square. Senior officials rejected the idea out of hand. Mr. Bannon proposed the Eisenhower building as a fallback option.
In January 2017, the incoming chief of staff, Reince Priebus, publicly confirmed that the team was weighing a move of press briefings to that location, framing it as a way to accommodate more reporters. But he and others dropped the idea, ultimately viewing it as too disruptive and impractical.
“From the moment I arrived in the White House I believed it was a national security threat to have the press literally surround the Oval Office — and devised a plan to either move them off campus next to the Blair House or at least to E.O.B.,” Mr. Bannon recalled in a statement to The New York Times this month. “But definitely physically remove them from the West Wing. That plan landed with a thud among all the other senior advisers to the president.”
The idea came up again during the summer of 2017, when the West Wing was undergoing renovations. A former administration official recalled that it was less a formal plan than an impulse tied to the renovations: With the space torn up anyway, why let the reporters back in? The official said that Sean Spicer, the departing press secretary, and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, his successor, questioned the logistical complexities. It soon died again.
The idea came up yet again during the presidential transition in late 2024. Most of Mr. Trump’s advisers thought it was better to leave the news media inside the White House. They knew Mr. Trump liked to call the cameras into the Oval Office at a moment’s notice. And several of his more seasoned advisers suspected that if they followed his direction to evict the press — and his coverage got worse — Mr. Trump would blame them for the inevitable results of his own idea.
But even without physically moving the news media to a building outside the White House main gates, the administration has for months been building up a buffer against the press. Last fall, Mr. Trump’s team barred reporters from entering “Upper Press,” the area near the press secretary’s office, without an appointment.
It has been more than 30 years since another president seriously considered removing the news media from the White House. President Bill Clinton’s first communications director, George Stephanopoulos, recounted in his memoir that in 1993 the first lady, Hillary Clinton, wanted to convert the press quarters back into a swimming pool. When word of her plan leaked, the blowback quickly ended it.
But Mr. Trump currently faces no comparable pressure to accommodate a news media that is despised by so many of his supporters. He has received relatively little backlash so far — even from Democrats — against his anti-media moves.
Attacks on the News Media
Mr. Trump entered his second term emboldened by his victory, and he quickly went on offense against media companies that had covered him critically. He filed lawsuits against ABC, CBS and The Des Moines Register. His aides made clear that the president intended these suits to have a chilling effect on negative coverage.
One of the instigators of the swimming pool discussion has been Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, according to two people familiar with the discussions. Mr. Pulte has no formal role in White House operations. But he created a foam board rendering of the briefing room restored as an in-ground pool, the people said.
Mr. Pulte often spends his weekends with Mr. Trump at his golf clubs. The president has only a tiny staff around him on the weekends, which means Mr. Pulte often enjoys freewheeling access to Mr. Trump, which he uses to pitch the president on his latest ideas. Senior White House officials say that Mr. Pulte brings along foam boards that highlight potential targets for revenge prosecutions.
Mr. Pulte did not respond to multiple messages seeking comment.
Another top adviser feeding into Mr. Trump’s anti-media tendencies is Boris Epshteyn, the president’s longtime lawyer and outside adviser, who pushed several of the lawsuits the president has filed against news outlets or individual journalists. Mr. Epshteyn’s influence has grown in recent months, according to current officials and people close to the president. Mr. Epshteyn declined to comment.
In September, Mr. Trump startled some of his own advisers by declaring on social media that he was banning CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House over coverage he called “fiction and lies.” The administration swiftly revoked the credentials of more than 70 journalists.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Natalie Harp, the aide who controls much of the media and messages from supporters that reach the president’s desk, and the majority of his social media feed, had played Mr. Trump clips of MS NOW anchors criticizing his administration shortly before he announced the ban on the three outlets.
Ms. Harp did not respond to a request for comment.
White House officials say the group that provides Mr. Trump updates about news coverage is wider than just Ms. Harp, and that she didn’t intend to prompt the media ban by showing him clips. He made a decision after months of his own anger over coverage, they said. Mr. Cheung singled out Ms. Harp for praise.
Judge Timothy J. Kelly, whom Mr. Trump appointed in his first term, had put a hold on the president’s media ban, saying officials there had violated standard process. But the White House continued for a short period to bar those outlets from the grounds. Judge Kelly last week ruled that the president had violated the outlets’ First Amendment rights and ordered their passes restored. The administration is appealing his ruling.
The campaign against the news media has not stopped there. On Oct. 9, the Justice Department sent letters demanding information from ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC and Fox News after the five networks temporarily halted their pooled White House TV coverage in solidarity with CNN. People with knowledge of the effort said it was an antitrust investigation.
That Justice Department effort came just a few months after F.B.I. agents showed up at the homes of Times reporters to serve them grand jury subpoenas. Earlier that week, they had reported on security concerns about Mr. Trump while he traveled to Turkey for the NATO summit, as well as the lack of some defensive equipment on the luxury jet, donated by Qatar, that Mr. Trump was using as his new Air Force One.
The president was livid about the reporting and demanded his aides find the leaks, multiple people familiar with the matter said.
The Justice Department withdrew the subpoenas within a few weeks, after the judge in the case admonished federal lawyers for violations of process in appearing to use subpoenas as a first option instead of a last resort to obtain information.
With Mr. Trump’s encouragement, other government departments have taken draconian measures against the press as well. For much of the past year, the Defense Department required credentialed reporters to sign a pledge that included not soliciting unauthorized information. Nearly every major news organization, including Fox News, refused to do so, and instead chose to give up work space in the building.
Maggie Haberman is a White House correspondent for The Times, reporting on President Trump.
Jonathan Swan is a White House reporter for The Times, covering the administration of Donald J. Trump. Contact him securely on Signal: @jonathan.941