Senator Richard Blumenthal, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, sent letters on Thursday 22 October to Tether chief executive Paolo Ardoino and to Nxum Group, asking both for details of the business arrangements between them, CoinDesk reported that evening. Nxum is the consulting firm Bo Hines co-founded with his father and another partner. Hines ran the White House crypto council from January to August 2025 and now heads Tether’s US business.
The letters follow a Wall Street Journal investigation published on 15 October. According to the Journal, Tether paid about $6.3 million to Nxum under a marketing deal struck in May 2025, while Hines still held his government post and a one-third stake in the firm. Tether answered the senator on Thursday with a short statement: outside lawyers had already investigated the matter and “found no evidence of wrongdoing”.
What exactly the senator wants is only partly public. The Defiant reported that the letters ask Tether and Nxum for payment records, crypto wallet addresses and lobbying communications, with replies due “by Nov. 3”. CoinDesk’s account of the same letters mentions no deadline. The letter to Ardoino is posted as a PDF on the subcommittee’s website, but the Senate server refused Coindaro’s requests, so the account below relies on these two outlets.
One point of law frames everything else. Blumenthal is in the minority. A letter from a ranking member is a request for information, not a subpoena, and neither company is obliged to answer it.
What the Blumenthal letters to Tether and Nxum ask for
Based on The Defiant’s report, the senator wants to see the payments themselves and the wallets that carried them, plus any communications about lobbying. The wallet question matters because, in the Journal’s account, the payments moved in crypto through an exchange and an intermediary before reaching an address tied to Nxum. No outlet has published the addresses. Protos said it found on-chain transfers that fit the Journal’s description, including a $1 test sent the day before the first payment, but added that it could not be certain they were the same transactions.
In the letter to Ardoino, as quoted by CoinDesk, Blumenthal writes that the terms of the relationship between Tether, Nxum and Hines “raise alarming ethical and legal concerns”. He also stresses who sat at the other end of the deal: in his words, “a current White House official with such a direct role in shaping cryptocurrency legislation”.
The letter to Nxum has not been published by any outlet Coindaro found, and neither has a full list of the questions put to Tether.
The senator’s words are allegations made in a political letter. No court, regulator or ethics office has found that Tether, Nxum or Hines broke any rule, and Coindaro found no sign that any authority has opened a case.
Tether’s answer: an internal review that found nothing
Tether’s reply, added to the CoinDesk article in an update at 7:36 pm EDT (23:36 UTC) on 22 October, does not engage with the requests one by one. It says that “external counsel previously conducted an in-depth internal investigation” and that this review “found no evidence of wrongdoing”. The statement gives no date for that review, does not name the law firm and does not say what it covered.
Tether did not answer the Journal’s requests for comment before the 15 October story ran, Unchained reported. Thursday’s statement is the first Tether comment on the payments that Coindaro has found.
Nxum and Hines had not commented on the letters by the time of CoinDesk’s update. In the Journal’s original story, Nxum denied any wrongdoing. A Nxum representative said Hines was “unaware of and uninvolved in” the firm’s Tether business while he was at the White House, according to Unchained, and that he “did not receive any Tether-derived funds during that period”, as Protos quoted the Journal.
That last point is where the documents stop. No source published so far shows that Hines personally received money from Tether while he was a White House official. The Journal’s account is about payments to a company he partly owned.
How the money reached Nxum, according to the Wall Street Journal
The Journal’s reconstruction, relayed by Fortune, Bitcoin.com News, Crypto Briefing and other outlets, starts with a meeting in New York in April 2025. Nxum’s partners, including Hines’s father, met Ardoino there. The meeting was set up by Peter Vincer, who runs a marketing firm called Notorious.
Nxum never signed with Tether directly. The contract ran through Notorious, at $415,000 a month for at least two years, for what was described as a “strategic brand and public affairs plan”. A draft from Vincer had Nxum overseeing “strategic lobbying” alongside a public relations campaign, Fortune reported, but the final agreement left out any reference to lobbying.
The first payment, $2.49 million, left the Bitfinex exchange on 11 May 2025. Vincer kept $498,000 and sent the rest on to a wallet tied to Nxum, according to Unchained and Protos, both citing the Journal. Vincer told the paper he acted only as an intermediary. Two further transfers of the same size followed in December 2025 and April 2026, by which time Hines had left the White House. After the intermediary’s fees, Nxum received about $6.3 million in total, the Journal calculated.
Laid out in order, the dates show how the first payment lines up with Hines’s months in office.
| Date | Event (as reported) | Source |
|---|---|---|
| January 2025 | Bo Hines becomes executive director of the White House digital assets council | Crypto Briefing |
| April 2025 | Nxum partners, including Hines’s father, meet Paolo Ardoino in New York | WSJ, via Fortune |
| May 2025 | Deal brokered through Notorious at $415,000 a month | WSJ, via Bitcoin.com News |
| 11 May 2025 | $2.49 million leaves Bitfinex; first payment reaches Nxum while Hines is in office | WSJ, via Bitcoin.com News |
| June 2025 | Signal messages show Hines passing GENIUS Act talking points to Nxum partners | WSJ, via Unchained |
| 18 July 2025 | GENIUS Act signed into law | Public record |
| August 2025 | Hines leaves the White House and joins Tether as an adviser | Crypto Briefing |
| September 2025 | Hines named chief executive of Tether’s US operations | Crypto Briefing |
| December 2025 | Second transfer to Nxum | WSJ, via Bitcoin.com News |
| April 2026 | Third transfer to Nxum | WSJ, via Bitcoin.com News |
| 15 October 2026 | Wall Street Journal publishes its investigation | Bitcoin.com News |
| 22 October 2026 | Blumenthal writes to Tether and Nxum | CoinDesk |
Hines, the GENIUS Act and a compliance window stretched from 18 to 36 months
The ethics question exists because of the job Hines held. From January to August 2025 he was the executive director of the President’s council on digital assets, and a public advocate of the GENIUS Act, the federal law on dollar stablecoins that President Trump signed on 18 July 2025.
According to the Journal, Signal messages show Hines passing talking points on the bill to his Nxum partners in June 2025, at a time when they were in contact with Ardoino. The paper also reports that he argued for lengthening a compliance deadline in the law from 18 to 36 months. A longer window helps foreign issuers such as Tether, whose USDT is issued outside the United States and will need to meet the law’s conditions to stay on US platforms.
The law itself takes effect on 18 January 2027; our page on what changes when the GENIUS Act takes effect sets out the timeline. Whether Hines’s push for a longer window actually shaped the final text is a matter of interpretation; the Journal reports the advocacy, not a causal link.
A White House official told the Journal that Hines no longer works there and that staff are expected to follow federal ethics rules. Nobody quoted in the coverage has said a specific rule was broken.
The $56 million stake that may or may not have happened
One detail in the Journal’s story points beyond the consulting fees: a proposed $56 million investment that would have given Tether a 25% stake in Nxum, as Bitcoin.com News relayed it.
Whether Tether ever agreed to that is unknown. No outlet has reported a signed deal, and Tether has not commented on it. If the purchase did go ahead, the story would move from fees paid to a former official’s company towards an ownership link between a stablecoin issuer and the firm that former official co-founded.
USAT and a Tether-linked PAC: where Hines and Nxum sit now
Hines left government in August 2025 and joined Tether as a strategic adviser, then became chief executive of its US operations in September. On 27 January 2026 Tether launched USAT, a dollar stablecoin built for the GENIUS Act and issued by Anchorage Digital Bank, a federally chartered bank supervised by the OCC, with Cantor Fitzgerald as reserve custodian, Decrypt reported. Hines runs it. USAT is the product Tether designed to meet the very law Hines worked on.
Nxum has stayed close to Tether’s political spending. Fellowship PAC, a super PAC chaired since April 2026 by Jesse Spiro, a Tether US executive, received $10 million from Cantor Fitzgerald in February 2026 and paid Nxum Group for more than $1 million of campaign advertising, The Block reported on 15 April, citing Federal Election Commission filings. CoinDesk has since described Nxum as the PAC’s main campaign-advertising provider, making millions of dollars from the work.
Nxum has also recently hired Harry Jung, another former White House crypto adviser, CoinDesk reported. The White House crypto office Hines once led is vacant since his successor, Patrick Witt, left.
Blumenthal’s third Tether-linked inquiry in four weeks
The Nxum letters are part of a campaign. On 28 September the subcommittee’s Democratic staff published a 28-page report, “Tethered to Terrorism”, which found that 87% of 757 wallets linked to Iranian terror finance mostly used USDT, according to The Block. The report also pointed to Cantor Fitzgerald’s ties to Tether and to Hines’s role as head of Tether US. Tether replied the same day that it had helped freeze about $550 million of Iran-linked USDT over the previous year.
On 8 October Blumenthal wrote to Cantor Fitzgerald’s chief executive, Brandon Lutnick, asking for records on the firm’s dealings with Tether. Decrypt and Unchained reported that the letter asked for answers by 23 October, which is today; Coindaro found no public reply from Cantor this morning.
On 19 October Ardoino published a rebuttal of the Iran report, saying its authors had ignored Tether’s freezes. CoinDesk adds that he accused the senator of giving the report to the press before Tether could respond. Our report on Tether’s freezes and the 34 Hezbollah-linked wallets covers that earlier exchange.
No subpoena power today, and an election on the deadline
A letter like this one works by pressure, not compulsion. Committees can issue subpoenas; a ranking member of the minority acting alone cannot. Companies often answer such letters in part, or with a summary, or not at all.
The calendar could change that. If The Defiant’s date is right, the replies are due on Tuesday 3 November, which is also Election Day in the United States. Kalshi’s prediction market gave Democrats a 69% chance of winning control of the Senate on 22 October, CoinDesk noted; that is a market price set by traders, not a forecast. If Democrats do take the chamber, Blumenthal could chair the investigations subcommittee from January 2027, with far more power to compel documents, and he has said crypto would be a top priority.
Dates to watch, as reported so far:
- 23 October 2026: reply date requested from Cantor Fitzgerald in the 8 October letter.
- 3 November 2026: replies from Tether and Nxum, according to The Defiant only; also US Election Day.
- January 2027: a new Congress sits, and committee chairs change if the Senate majority does.
- 18 January 2027: the GENIUS Act takes effect.
What this means for USDT holders
Very little, in the short term. The letters are about payments to a consulting firm and the ethics of a former official, not about the reserves behind USDT; our profile of Tether, its reserves and its regulators covers those.
The longer-term exposure is political. Tether is trying to build a US business, USAT, inside a law its US chief helped promote while he co-owned a firm Tether was paying. If Congress changes hands, that history becomes the subject of hearings rather than letters. For a refresher on how dollar tokens work, see our glossary entry on stablecoins.