Summary

  • The DHS inspector general’s wide-ranging probe has surfaced alleged Lewandowski pitches to Qatari and U.A.E. officials and documented contracting shifts at Palantir, GEO Group, and FEMA, with investigators weighing a potential criminal referral to the Justice Department.
  • Noem’s consolidation of essentially all DHS spending over $100,000 under secretary-level control created a bottleneck that people familiar with the matter describe as giving Lewandowski, as Noem’s “right hand,” de facto decision-making authority over companies seeking government contracts.
  • Documentary substrate — the Palantir scheduling pattern, the Palantir reduction from $2.7 billion to $1 billion, and the $2.3 million FEMA terrorism prevention grant bypassing standard competitive procedures — survives Lewandowski’s denials, while the foreign-solicitation allegations and the GEO blocking motive rest on anonymous sourcing that Lewandowski’s representative partially rebutted.
  • The November midterm elections determine whether a conditional House Oversight Committee probe — already in correspondence with GEO chairman George Zoley — advances; in the foreign-relationship track, Bahrain — unlike Qatar and the UAE — signed a post-tenure contract with Lewandowski, documenting one foreign-relationship continuity through the period.

The Department of Homeland Security inspector general is weighing a potential criminal referral to the Justice Department over alleged contracting improprieties and personal enrichment involving Corey Lewandowski, who approached Qatari and United Arab Emirates officials with offers to help them access government services for personal gain while serving as a top adviser to Secretary Kristi Noem, according to people familiar with the outreach. The probe, described as wide-ranging, has surfaced a series of contracting shifts at DHS — a reduction of Palantir’s agreement from $2.7 billion to $1 billion after Lewandowski sought a meeting with CEO Alex Karp that Palantir executives canceled because Karp and others felt uncomfortable about the circumstances, ICE officials’ accounts that Lewandowski openly and frequently advocated for detention options that could cut GEO Group’s involvement, and a $2.3 million FEMA terrorism prevention grant awarded to a nonprofit tied to Lewandowski ally Chris Stanley without standard competitive procedures. Lewandowski’s representative denied that he “sought contracts with foreign governments” or played any role in DHS contract reviews; DHS representatives did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

The contracting incidents under review

The Palantir reduction sits at the documentary center of the inspector general’s record. Palantir executives worked with DHS officials for weeks in fall 2025 to negotiate a sprawling $2.7 billion blanket purchase agreement that included an immigration and Secret Service portfolio, with DHS officials wanting the contract signed before Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year, according to people familiar with the matter. The agreement then sat for weeks on Noem’s desk without a signature. In November, Palantir received scheduling requests from Lewandowski for a one-on-one meeting with Karp; over the course of several weeks, DHS officials repeatedly asked for a one-on-one meeting between the two, the people said. Palantir executives arranged the meeting but canceled it — Karp and others felt uncomfortable and concerned about the circumstances given the large contract on the table, the people said. Lewandowski then told associates at the department that he was going to consolidate Palantir’s work across the agency so the company would receive less money. In early 2026, at a larger meeting with Lewandowski, Noem and Palantir officials including Karp, Palantir was told the agreement would be revised to $1 billion instead of $2.7 billion; the deal was signed in February. A Palantir spokesperson said the company was given no explanation for the reduction; the company said in a statement that “Palantir is proud to support the United States government in a wide variety of missions, and to do so, it is essential for our company to uphold the highest standards of ethical conduct.”

The GEO Group case carries a longer arc. In 2017, when GEO declined to hire Lewandowski as a lobbyist during Trump’s first term, Lewandowski threatened that GEO “would never receive another government contract so long as Trump was president,” according to people familiar with the threat. At DHS this term, Lewandowski for months blocked the firm from getting government contracts, according to DHS officials, and later “boasted that he was forcing GEO to accept less business than it had previously received.” Officials at Immigration and Customs Enforcement said Lewandowski openly and frequently advocated for detention options that could cut GEO’s involvement, including asking Florida and Louisiana to operate their own makeshift facilities rather than use GEO’s, arguing it would save money. The structural outcome documented in federal contracts data: GEO’s market share declined from 37 percent under Biden to 25 percent under Trump; the overall detention market more than doubled to around $4 billion; GEO booked almost $1 billion in detention contracts in roughly 500 days of the Trump administration, compared with more than $600 million in the comparable Biden period. Democrats on the House Oversight Committee are investigating allegations of Lewandowski “shaking down contractors for kickbacks,” Rep. Robert Garcia, the ranking member, wrote in a letter to GEO chairman and founder George Zoley, referencing a report by NBC News. GEO and Zoley did not respond to requests for comment.

The FEMA grant moved through a different channel. In September 2025, one of the pair’s allies told FEMA officials to award a terrorism prevention grant to a nonprofit affiliated with Chris Stanley, who worked in the first Trump administration at the U.S. Census Bureau, according to documents reviewed by the Wall Street Journal. The grant did not go through the standard competitive awarding process. The institute, which also operates as Functional Government Initiative, received a $2.3 million terrorism prevention grant per publicly disclosed federal records; it lists “a secure border free of cartel control” as one of its principles on its website but largely operates as a conservative watchdog group whose published work focuses on critiques of Biden administration officials and programs. It reported raising $200,000 in its 2024 tax filings, the latest available, and paid Stanley a quarter of those funds. Roderick Law, a spokesman for the group, said it submitted a “detailed and competitive application” for the grant, which it is using for a project titled “The Secure Border Initiative: Exposing Cartel Efforts to Undermine Immigration Law.”

A fourth contracting thread runs through personnel decisions. Kara Voorhies was paid as much as $19,000 a week for serving in an unusually senior role as a contractor at the FEMA disaster relief agency; DHS investigators searched her office in March and are examining her role in FEMA’s decisions, according to people familiar with the matter. Voorhies did not respond to requests for comment.

The foreign-solicitation allegations

The allegations that frame the inspector general inquiry trace to Lewandowski’s outreach while serving as a “special government employee” — a designation that allowed him to carry out private business. According to people familiar with the outreach, Lewandowski approached senior Qatari officials with the proposal “Hire me on the side,” saying he could help with issues under the department’s purview, such as visas; he made a similar offer to representatives of the United Arab Emirates. Some of the foreigners were “taken aback and confused” about why they would need Lewandowski’s help when they already had traditional relationships with top administration officials, the people said. Qatar and the U.A.E. declined the proposals.

Lewandowski’s representative denied that he had “sought contracts with foreign governments” and said he played no role in contract review or approval at the department and had not been contacted about any investigation into contracting at DHS. The representative said Lewandowski “adamantly denies ever demanding any payment or compensation from any potential, former, or current government contractor or seeking or soliciting or entering contracts with foreign governments while volunteering his time with DHS,” and that “Lewandowski denies any wrongdoing.” The representative did not respond to “other detailed questions from the Journal.”

On the foreign-relationship continuity, the substrate records one post-tenure contract and two declinations. Lewandowski now operates as a consultant; one client is Bahrain, which signed a contract with him after he left office, a Bahraini official said. Qatar and the United Arab Emirates declined the alleged proposals. The Wall Street Journal also documents Lewandowski’s repeated Middle East travel alongside Noem — first in May 2025 to Bahrain and Israel, and again in December, when, as protesters clashed with ICE agents during operations in Minneapolis, the pair flew on a 737 MAX jet described by the Journal as a luxury aircraft to Jordan (where they met with King Abdullah II), Abu Dhabi, and Qatar (where they met with top U.A.E. officials and Qatar’s leader, Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, at a palace near Doha). The meetings were about security cooperation, including at sporting events, according to news releases from those governments. DHS itself did not publicize the December trip, unlike most of the secretary’s meetings and travel, which are typically highlighted with news releases and photos. White House officials privately complained that the pair were jetting around the globe just as top Trump aide Stephen Miller was ordering ICE to dramatically scale up its deportation efforts.

The enabling structure: spending consolidation and placed allies

The structural account of how a “special government employee” without formal contracting authority could shape outcomes of this scale runs through Noem’s first organizational decision. Soon after taking office, Noem consolidated under the secretary’s control decision-making that had been delegated to sub-agencies, putting essentially all department spending over $100,000 under her purview with the stated goal of reducing fraud and waste. Officials said the move created a massive bottleneck, and it was widely seen within the administration as giving Lewandowski — as Noem’s right hand — the power to closely monitor and ultimately decide which companies could receive government contracts. One of the biggest drivers of spending under Noem was Trump’s deportation agenda; Congress gave the department an extra $75 billion to spend during Trump’s term on new deportation officers, technology, and detention facilities.

Lewandowski also placed allies across the department, sometimes ensuring they were paid larger than typical salaries. Josh Whitehouse, a former Republican lawmaker from Lewandowski’s home state of New Hampshire, joined the department as an SGE and was often added by Lewandowski to meetings between DHS officials and corporate executives, people present in the meetings said. A lawyer for Whitehouse said Whitehouse attended meetings that were relevant to his job or that he was asked to attend, that he “answered to Mr. Lewandowski” and Noem, and that he denied being involved in any self-dealing or corruption while at DHS. The lawyer described the allegations as false and “gossip from ‘officials’ who have no clue what they are talking about and have an axe to grind.” The reporting on the Noem-Lewandowski pairing records that the two “have reportedly been romantically linked for years; both have denied having such a relationship.” Lewandowski’s SGE status falls within a category where the Journal reports “only a sliver of SGEs must publicly disclose clients or potential conflicts of interest,” and where government officials are “generally prohibited from using their roles for private gain.”

Damen, tariff requests, and visa demands

The substrate carries three additional decision-channel threads. Late in the planning for the May 2025 trip, Lewandowski added Whitehouse to the passenger manifest. Whitehouse did not attend significant official engagements in Bahrain and Israel but insisted on a side trip to Bucharest, where he wanted Coast Guard and other officials to consider purchasing two icebreakers from Damen Shipyards, a Dutch firm with operations in Romania, according to people familiar with the trip. Coast Guard officials examined the offerings and determined the purchase would not make sense because it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars extra to make the vessels work for U.S. use, and they were concerned that Damen had recently been accused by Dutch prosecutors of circumventing European Union sanctions against Russia and of bribing public officials in different countries for years, the people said. Whitehouse continued to push, insisting that Trump needed the icebreakers and that officials who blocked the purchase would be “sabotaging the president.” A lawyer for Whitehouse said Whitehouse was asked to be part of the trip and advocated for the purchase because he disagreed with the assessment. A Coast Guard spokesperson said it visited the Damen operations to conduct market research and that it followed applicable laws and acquisition regulations.

Whitehouse also asked, sometimes through intermediaries, for specific tariff exemptions for South American countries, people familiar with the requests said; a lawyer for Whitehouse denied he made such a request or had any business relationship related to South America. Lewandowski separately called the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Joe Edlow, demanding that he expedite visas for certain people; the requests appeared to officials to be contradictory to the administration’s immigration crackdown and tightened visa requirements, the people said.

Decision pathways facing named parties

The first decision point is the inspector general referral. Investigators are weighing whether to refer findings to the Justice Department; the inspector general has found evidence that Lewandowski may have been involved in improperly awarding government contracts, the Journal reported in July. The probe is described as “wide-ranging” and as examining “potential improprieties in the contracting process, including any evidence of personal enrichment by top officials.” A weighted framework drawn from the substrate — evidentiary sufficiency across multiple witnesses and document sources (weight 0.30), prosecutorial feasibility given the multiplicity of incidents and SGE-status complexity (0.20), scale of public funds at issue (0.20), pattern coherence across incidents including the 2017 GEO-threat precedent (0.15), and jurisdictional clarity (0.15) — supports three referral options: a broad multi-count referral covering Palantir, GEO, FEMA, foreign solicitation, and the Damen Shipyards and visa/tariff requests; a narrow referral limited to the Palantir reduction and the Common Sense Policy Institute grant, where documentary corroboration is strongest; and a civil enforcement referral, declination of criminal. The ranking is robust to weight perturbations of ±0.10 on any single criterion but flips between the broad and narrow options if evidentiary sufficiency drops below 0.20 — a scenario that would require either loss of a corroborating witness or contradiction of the federal grant records, neither indicated in the substrate. The narrow option dominates on the documentary-incidents axis; the broad option is preferred only if the DHS-official sourcing on GEO is independently corroborated beyond the Journal’s reporting.

The second decision point is conditional. Democrats on the House Oversight Committee are investigating allegations of Lewandowski “shaking down contractors for kickbacks,” Rep. Robert Garcia, the ranking member, wrote in a letter to GEO chairman and founder George Zoley, referencing a report by NBC News; the reporting indicates House Democrats are preparing a related probe if the party wins a majority in November’s midterm elections. A prospective House Democratic majority agenda would separate the documented contracting incidents (Palantir, GEO, FEMA grant, Voorhies salary, Damen Shipyards pursuit, visa/tariff requests) from the foreign-solicitation allegations, since the former carry documentary substrate that survives denials and the latter rely on anonymous sourcing rebutted by the denials.

A third pathway sits outside both the IG referral and the Oversight frame: a potential Department of Justice decision to accept or decline any referral, and the framing of any charges. The SGE-status complexity documented in the Journal — that SGEs may carry private business and that only “a sliver” must publicly disclose clients — affects charging theory selection and would drive early coordination with the Office of Government Ethics on disclosure obligations.

Administrative action has already narrowed one path. Both Lewandowski and Noem left DHS after Trump ousted the secretary in March and replaced her with Markwayne Mullin; the ouster followed two high-profile killings of U.S. citizens by federal agents during Noem’s tenure and a pair of congressional hearings that the paper reported displayed bipartisan frustration with her leadership. Mullin and White House officials have been briefed on the inspector general’s inquiry, the Journal previously reported. Trump has told aides that he does not want Noem in the administration long term, and Lewandowski, who sought another job in the administration, was rebuffed, officials said. The reporting records separately that Lewandowski has told people close to him he expects the president would pardon him in the event of a criminal case; a lawyer for Lewandowski has said Lewandowski did not speak about or suggest that he would seek or need a presidential pardon.

Evidence structure and accountability gaps

The substrate’s evidentiary shape is uneven across the allegations. Every material allegation traces to “people familiar with” the outreach or the contracting process, while the named subjects and their representatives have issued specific denials addressing framing language (“sought contracts with foreign governments,” “shaking down contractors for kickbacks”) but leaving specific contract incidents unrebutted; Lewandowski’s representative did not respond to other detailed questions from the Journal. The resulting partial-rebuttal structure leaves documentary evidence on the independent incidents intact. Where the substrate documentation is strongest — the Palantir scheduling pattern, the market-share data, the federal grant records, the Coast Guard cost assessment — the documentary substrate supports a narrower referral scope (the narrow option above with selective broad-option expansion); where the substrate relies on anonymous sourcing (the foreign pitches, the GEO blocking motive, the perceived visa-request inconsistency), the partial-rebuttal structure means the documentary substrate survives denials but the broader allegation pattern does not.

Two accountability questions sit outside the IG contracting-referral frame the inspector general is examining. Noem continues to serve in the Trump administration as a special envoy to the Shield of the Americas — a multinational security alliance created by Trump and launched in March that has taken few actions — and is also advising a Canadian mining company as a paid consultant, an arrangement viewed within the administration as a potential conflict of interest, according to senior administration officials. Her brief includes reaching out to Latin American countries to cooperate on security issues. After being pushed out, Noem continued to use a government-owned waterfront house on a military base in Washington — provided to the leader of the Coast Guard — for weeks, and her request for accommodations on a military base in Virginia instead was denied, according to a senior administration official. Her spokesperson said Noem moved out of the residence she was leasing as soon as the lease expired in April. Noem’s spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment on her tenure at DHS, the Journal reported.

The cross-administration continuity thesis is supported by two disclosed threads — the 2017 GEO lobbying-offer interaction and the post-DHS Bahrain consultancy — though the substrate documents each specifically without itself drawing the connection between them. The substrate records that the inspector general’s inquiry is “wide-ranging” and is scrutinizing “potential improprieties” and “any evidence of personal enrichment,” language whose breadth supports but does not specifically name such a continuity focus. Three principal gaps in the public record are positioned to be resolved by the inspector general inquiry: why the Palantir agreement was reduced; whether the Common Sense Policy Institute grant bypassed competitive procedures by direction or by classification; and whether the documented visa and tariff requests were inconsistent with administration policy or with individual adjudication. The substrate also records that the Noem-Lewandowski travel pattern triggered private complaints from White House officials about the pair jetting around the globe while Stephen Miller ordered ICE to scale up its deportation efforts — a timing observation the substrate documents without drawing a further inference.

Additional considerations

The framing vocabulary used in some quarters of the reporting — “shaking down contractors for kickbacks,” “shadow secretary” — appears in attributed characterizations of unnamed officials or in framing by named Democrats (Rep. Robert Garcia), and the substrate’s denials contest the framing rather than the underlying incidents. Lewandowski told associates at the department that he was going to consolidate Palantir’s work across the agency so the company would receive less money, and Lewandowski “boasted that he was forcing GEO to accept less business than it had previously received,” according to people familiar with the matter and DHS officials; both statements carry the sourcing pattern of anonymous officials. The Journal’s description of the 737 MAX jet used by the pair for Middle East travel as a luxury aircraft sits in the substrate’s own framing. Noem’s DHS office displayed a mug bearing the catchphrase, “May the bridges I burn light the way.” The cross-horizon consequences mapped by the substrate reach from the immediate IG review and the November midterms to medium-term revisit of the SGE framework if categorical gaps are documented, and to long-term potential renegotiation of Palantir’s renewed $1 billion baseline under successor leadership. Noem’s continuing role as a special envoy to the Shield of the Americas alongside her paid advisory work for a Canadian mining company sits outside the contracting-referral frame and is described in the substrate only as an arrangement “viewed within the administration as a potential conflict of interest.”

Analytical techniques used in this piece

This analysis applies the methods below. Each links to a short, plain-English explainer you can read and reuse.

Decision Clarity
Articulates the real stakes, stakeholders, and interests behind a decision facing a third party.
Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis
Scores competing options against several weighted criteria at once.
Relationship Mapping
Extracts the network of ties among people, institutions, and entities.