WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump has peppered aides in recent days about whether longtime adviser Corey Lewandowski profited personally from a $220 million federal advertising campaign featuring Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who was fired last week, according to three people familiar with his conversations.
“He’s mentioned the ads several times,” a senior White House official said, referring to Trump asking questions about Lewandowski’s role in the ad contract.
The ads were a repeated focus of lawmakers’ questions during a pair of contentious hearings on Capitol Hill last week that led in part to Trump’s decision to remove Noem as head of the agency and reassign her to a role as special envoy to the newly formed “Shield of the Americas.”
Trump told NBC News that he “wasn’t thrilled” when Noem testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee that he had signed off on her expensive ad campaign. Contradicting Noem, he said that he “didn’t know anything about it” at the time.
Behind the scenes, he has grown suspicious about Lewandowski’s role in doling out government contracts, according to the three people familiar with his conversations.
Lewandowski has served as a “special government employee” at DHS for more than a year, operating as a de facto chief of staff to Noem. And DHS officials and lobbyists say he has wielded outsize influence in the awarding of federal contracts.
In an interview with NBC News on Monday, Lewandowski categorically denied that he had made money from DHS contracts.
Asked if he has ever received “any money from any of the contracts” he has signed off on, Lewandowski told NBC News in an interview, “zero, not one penny.”
The White House declined to comment on Lewandowski’s assertions.
The ad campaign, which included images of Noem on horseback discussing the American dream and talking tough about cracking down on undocumented immigrants, caught Trump’s attention, and two of the people familiar with his conversations said he has brought it up repeatedly with his advisers. In one instance, he told advisers last week, “Corey made out on that one,” according to another senior White House official.
Lewandowski told NBC News he had spoken with Trump on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of last week — the three days before Noem was fired — and that the president had not brought up the ads or contracts with him. He also said that it is his own decision whether he leaves DHS with Noem on March 31 and that he has not made up his mind about that.
“Since I’ve known the guy for 11 years, I think it’s fair to say if he had a concern about something I was doing, he would raise it,” Lewandowski said of Trump in the interview.
Lewandowski was the first manager on Trump’s first campaign, and the two men have remained personally close — even after Trump pushed him to the sidelines of his 2024 campaign after Lewandowski had a dust-up with Susie Wiles, his campaign manager and now the White House chief of staff.
While Trump consistently praises Noem for helping cut off the U.S. border with Mexico, his mounting frustration with her handling of public relations had been spilling into public view for weeks.
In February, he switched up the team overseeing DHS’ Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis after federal agents shot and killed two American citizens. Since then, Noem has had to fend off reports about her acquisition of a luxury jet, her relationship with agencies within her department and stories about contracting problems at DHS.
The ad campaign has also become a focus for Democratic lawmakers, two of whom launched an investigation into three businesses that won contracts from DHS to produce the ads — Safe America Media, the Strategy Group and People Who Think.
In letters to the businesses, Sens. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and Peter Welch, D-Vt., said Safe America Media signed a $143 million no-bid contract with DHS and subcontracted part of it out to the Strategy Group. They also said People Who Think inked a $77 million no-bid deal with the agency.
The Strategy Group is run by Ben Yoho, the husband of former DHS spokeswoman Tricia McGlaughlin.
Welch and Blumenthal wrote that their concerns stem from news reports, including a November story by ProPublica detailing ties between the ad contracts and a firm with connections to Noem. They asked the three businesses to provide documentation of their agreements with DHS, which companies they subcontracted with and whether they had deals in place with Lewandowski.