Trump ally Lewandowski sought payment for DHS contract

More than a year ago, The GEO Group founder George Zoley asked for a meeting with Corey Lewandowski, a close ally of President Donald Trump who had just started a powerful position as a top adviser to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, reported NBC News.

As a titan of the private prison industry, GEO Group stood to benefit from Trump’s mass deportation agenda, which would require the federal government to spend tens of billions of dollars to transport, detain, monitor and deport undocumented immigrants. The company’s federal contracts in those areas already totaled more than $1 billion per year.

But Zoley and his advisers were worried that the road to securing new government contracts now ran through Lewandowski. The two had history: Lewandowski and Zoley had butted heads during the transition between Trump’s November 2024 election and his January 2025 inauguration, before Lewandowski officially worked for the government, according to two industry sources and one senior DHS official familiar with the matter.

During the transition, Lewandowski told Zoley that he wanted to be paid in exchange for protecting and growing GEO Group’s DHS contracts, according to a senior DHS official and three people familiar with their discussion. Zoley, concerned about the propriety of the ask, told Lewandowski he would have no part of it, the sources said, describing the confrontation as tense.

Lewandowski took a role as an unpaid “special government employee” at DHS once the new administration was sworn in, where he advised and acted as a “de facto chief of staff” to Noem and, sources said, influenced contract awards. Zoley scrambled to find a way to assuage tensions from the meeting during the transition, two industry sources familiar with the matter said. He secured a follow-up with Lewandowski in late February or early March 2025.

That second meeting did not go much better.

Zoley offered to put Lewandowski on retainer — a recurring consulting fee — with GEO Group, according to two industry sources familiar with the matter.

Lewandowski balked, saying he wanted to be compensated based on the company’s new or renewed contracts with DHS, the two sources said.

“He wanted payments — what some people would call a success fee,” said a person with knowledge of the meeting.

Zoley declined, the two sources said. In the months that followed, the length of two of GEO Group’s federal contracts shrank, and currently several of its facilities that could house migrants sit idle, even as Congress and Trump have poured money into DHS to execute the mass deportation campaign. GEO Group officials believe that is tied to their not agreeing to Lewandowski’s solicitations, said a source familiar with the GEO Group officials’ thinking.

A senior DHS official told NBC News that within weeks of Lewandowski’s second meeting with Zoley, Lewandowski told him not to award more contracts to GEO Group. Lewandowski, through a spokesperson, denied that. Months later, in December 2025, GEO Group did receive a new contract for $121 million for services that help locate immigrants DHS is trying to find.

Lewandowski‘s spokesperson denied this account of his interactions with GEO Group. “This is absolutely false and did not happen — Mr. Lewandowski never demanded any payment or compensation from the Geo Group, at any time,” his representative said.

Asked whether he has ever received “any money from any of the contracts” he has signed off on, Lewandowski previously told NBC News in an interview, “zero, not one penny.”

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