Trump asked aides about Corey Lewandowski’s role in the DHS ad campaign, sources said.

WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump has told aides in recent days that longtime adviser Corey Lewandowski personally benefited from a $220 million campaign involving Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who was fired last week, according to three people familiar with his negotiations.

“He’s talked about the ads many times,” a senior White House official said, referring to Trump’s questioning of Lewandowski’s role in the ad contract.

The ads were the focus of questions from lawmakers during two hearings on Capitol Hill last week that led to Trump’s decision to remove Noem as head of the agency and appoint him as special envoy to the newly created “Shield of the Americas.”

Trump told NBC News he was “not happy” when Noem testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that he had signed off on his expensive ad campaign. Opposing Noem, he said he “didn’t know anything about it” at the time.

Behind the scenes, he has grown suspicious of Lewandowski’s role in ending government contracts, according to three people familiar with his negotiations.

Lewandowski served as a “special civil servant” at DHS for more than a year, serving as Noem’s chief of staff. And DHS officials and lobbyists say he has had a major impact on the awarding of government contracts.

In an interview with NBC News on Monday, Lewandowski flatly denied that he made money off the DHS contracts.

Asked if he had received “any money from any of the contracts” he signed, Lewandowski told NBC News in an interview, “zero, not one cent.”

The White House declined to comment on Lewandowski’s assertion.

The ad campaign, which features images of Noem on horseback discussing the American dream and speaking tough about the persecution of undocumented immigrants, has caught Trump’s attention, and two people familiar with his conversations say he has repeatedly brought it up with his advisers. In one incident, he told advisers last week, “Corey won that one,” according to one senior White House official.

Lewandowski told NBC News that he spoke with Trump on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of last week — three days before Noem was fired — and that the president did not bring any ads or contracts with him. He also said that it is his decision whether to leave DHS with Noem on March 31 and that he has not made a decision about that.

“Having known this guy for 11 years, I think it’s fair to say that if he had any concerns about what I was doing, he would raise it,” Lewandowski said of Trump in the interview.

Lewandowski became Trump’s first campaign manager, and the two men remained close — even after Trump pushed him aside from his 2024 campaign after Lewandowski broke up with Susie Wiles, his campaign manager and now White House chief of staff.

While Trump has often praised Noem for helping demarcate the US-Mexico border, his growing frustration with his handling of public relations has been spilling over into the public eye for weeks.

In February, he replaced the team that oversaw DHS’ Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis after federal agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens. Since then, Noem has had to suppress reports about his luxury jet purchases, his relationships with agencies in his department and news about DHS’s findings.

The ad campaign has become a focus of Democratic lawmakers, two of whom have launched investigations into three businesses that received contracts from DHS to produce the ads – Safe America Media, Strategy Group and People Who Think.

In letters written to 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 gave a portion of it to Strategy Group. They also said that People Who Think entered into a $77 million no-bid agreement with the organization.

The Strategy Group is run by Ben Yoho, the husband of former DHS spokeswoman Tricia McGlaughlin.

Welch and Blumenthal wrote that their concerns stemmed from news reports, including a November ProPublica story that detailed a relationship between advertising contracts and a company affiliated with Noem. They asked the three businesses to provide documentation of their contracts with DHS, which companies they contracted with and whether they had any contracts with Lewandowski.