Senate Democrat Probes Tether Payments to Ex-White House Crypto Adviser’s Firm

Tether is facing fresh scrutiny in the Senate over millions of dollars that reportedly flowed to a firm co-owned by Bo Hines while he helped shape U.S. stablecoin law at the White House.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., the top Democrat on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, sent Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino a letter Thursday demanding records of the company’s dealings with Hines and Nxum, the consulting firm he co-founded. Blumenthal gave Tether until Nov. 3 to respond.

Hines was executive director of President Donald Trump’s Presidential Council of Advisers for Digital Assets and a key architect of the GENIUS Act, signed in July 2025. He left the White House on Aug. 9, 2025, and Tether named him CEO of its new U.S. division the following month.

Blumenthal’s letter builds on an Oct. 14 Wall Street Journal investigation. The Journal reported that Nxum has earned $6.3 million from a deal Tether struck in May 2025. Tether agreed to pay a marketing firm, Notorious, $415,000 a month, and the firm passed most of the first payment to a wallet used by Nxum, where it was split three ways. Later payments went directly to Nxum after Hines left government. Hines kept his one-third stake in Nxum while serving in the White House, the Journal reported.

The Journal also reported that Hines urged lawmakers to double the law’s compliance window from 18 to 36 months, a change that chiefly benefited Tether. Messages it reviewed showed Hines sharing talking points about Republican holdouts with his Nxum partners. After a call from Ardoino, Hines’ father and Nxum co-owner, Todd Hines, wrote: “They want us to obliterate these members that are fighting crypto.”

A Nxum representative told the Journal that Hines wasn’t involved in the Tether deal while in government and “did not receive any Tether-derived funds during that period.”

“Tether is aware of the allegations reported in The Wall Street Journal that form the basis of Senator Blumenthal’s letter,” Tether today said in a statement. “External counsel previously conducted an in-depth internal investigation into the matter, which found no evidence of wrongdoing.”

Blumenthal wrote that the payment structure suggests Tether “was likely well aware of the illegality and impropriety” of paying a sitting official, and that the arrangement “implicates federal ethics, anticorruption, and lobbying laws.” He also asked about a Nxum pitch deck, reported by the Journal, saying Tether would buy a 25% stake in the firm for $56 million.

It’s Blumenthal’s second Tether-linked letter this month. On Oct. 8, he asked Cantor Fitzgerald, Tether’s reserve custodian and a 5% shareholder chaired by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s son, for records on that relationship.

That letter followed a report from his staff finding that most Iran-linked wallets used USDT. Tether responded by citing about $550 million in Iran-linked freezes, including $344 million in April.

Lutnick defended Tether at his confirmation hearing last year, and Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden pressed him in April over a reported Tether loan to a trust for his children.