WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump has criticized aides in recent days over whether his adviser Corey Lewandowski personally benefited from a $220 million federal ad campaign involving Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who was fired last week, according to three people familiar with their conversations.
“He has mentioned the ads several times,” a senior White House official said, referring to Trump raising questions about Lewandowski’s role in the advertising deal.
The ads were the repeated focus of questions from lawmakers 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 special envoy role to the newly formed “Shield of the Americas.”
Trump told NBC News he was “not thrilled” when Noem testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that she had approved his expensive ad campaign. Contradicting Noem, he said he “didn’t know anything about it” at the time.
Behind the scenes, he has become suspicious of Lewandowski’s role in doling out government contracts, according to three people familiar with their conversations.
Lewandowski has worked as a “special government employee” at DHS for more than a year, acting as Noem’s de facto chief of staff. And DHS officials and lobbyists say it has exerted enormous influence on the awarding of federal contracts.
In an interview with NBC News on Monday, Lewandowski categorically denied making money from DHS contracts.
When asked if he ever received “any money from any of the contracts” he signed, Lewandowski told NBC News in an interview, “zero, not a cent.”
The White House declined to comment on Lewandowski’s claims.
The ad campaign, which included footage of Noem on horseback discussing the American dream and speaking harshly about the crackdown on undocumented immigrants, caught Trump’s attention, and two of the people familiar with their conversations said she had raised it repeatedly with advisers. In one case, he told aides last week, “Corey made out with it,” according to another senior White House official.
Lewandowski told NBC News that he had spoken to Trump on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of last week, the three days before Noem was fired, and that the president had not mentioned the ads or contracts to him. He also said it is his own decision whether to leave DHS with Noem on March 31 and that he has not made a decision on the matter.
“Having known this guy for 11 years, I think it’s fair to say that if he had any concerns about something I was doing, I would raise them,” Lewandowski said of Trump in the interview.
Lewandowski was the first manager of Trump’s first campaign, and the two men have remained personally close, even after Trump sidelined him in his 2024 campaign after Lewandowski had an altercation with Susie Wiles, his campaign manager and now White House chief of staff.
While Trump consistently praises Noem for helping cut the U.S. border with Mexico, his growing frustration with her handling of public relations had been coming to light for weeks.
In February, the team overseeing DHS’s Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis changed after federal agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens. Since then, Noem has had to defend herself against reports about her acquisition of a luxury plane, her relationship with agencies within her department and stories about hiring problems at DHS.
The ad campaign has also become a focus of Democratic lawmakers, two of whom launched an investigation into three companies that won DHS contracts to produce the ads: Safe America Media, Strategy Group and People Who Think.
In letters to the companies, Sens. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and Peter Welch, D-Vermont, said Safe America Media signed a $143 million no-bid contract with DHS and subcontracted part of it to Strategy Group. They also said People Who Think signed a $77 million no-bid deal with the agency.
The Strategy Group is led by Ben Yoho, the husband of former DHS spokesperson Tricia McGlaughlin.
Welch and Blumenthal wrote that their concerns arise from news reports, including a November ProPublica article detailing links between advertising contracts and a company with connections to Noem. They asked the three companies to provide documentation of their agreements with DHS, which companies they subcontracted with, and whether they had agreements in place with Lewandowski.
