White House border czar Tom Homan said he has never accepted a bribe from "anybody."
"I didn't take $50,000 from anybody," Homan said during NewsNation's "Cuomo" town hall Wednesday, referring to reports he accepted $50,000 in cash from undercover FBI agents last year in an apparent public corruption investigation that was later closed.
Homan has said he has done nothing wrong, but Wednesday's statement was the first time he denied accepting a cash payment.
When asked by Bill O'Reilly how the report got into the mainstream news, Homan responded: "I don't know. There's been hit pieces on me since I came back to this administration.
"There's got to be 30, 40 hit pieces on me about how I'm involved with contracts, government contracts, when in fact Day 1 I came back, I recused myself from any discussions of any contract or any monetary decisions like that, because I used to have a company that did consulting, so I cleared myself day one.
"What people don't talk about is I took a significant, huge pay cut to come back and serve my nation, and I'm not enriching myself doing this job."
But Homan said he isn't angry about the criticism or allegations.
"I don't care what people think about me. I never have," he said. "Because I know who I am. I work for the greatest president in the history of this nation, in my opinion, and we're doing the right thing every day."
Following the initial bombshell MSNBC report, Homan insisted that he "did nothing criminal" but stopped short of denying that he accepted the cash payment.
"Look, I did nothing criminal. I did nothing illegal," Homan said on Fox News in late September. "It's hit piece after hit piece after hit piece and I'm glad the FBI and DOJ came out and said, you know, said that nothing illegal happened, no criminal activity."
The White House has acknowledged that federal authorities conducted a probe but said there was no "credible evidence" of criminal wrongdoing by Homan and have repeatedly dismissed the investigation as politically motivated.
Attorney General Pam Bondi said last week during a Senate hearing that "the investigation of Mr. Homan was subjected to a full review by the FBI, agents and DOJ prosecutors" and that they "found no credible evidence of any wrongdoing."
Biden administration prosecutors reportedly were considering four different charges relating to the matter but decided to wait until Homan took an official job after a Trump victory since a person cannot be charged under federal bribery statutes unless they are a public official.
Democrats in the House and Senate have opened separate investigations into the administration's decision to stop the FBI probe.