USDT meets the Senate: A $6.3 million payment trail draws a new probe

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 Bo Hines and Nxum, the consulting firm he co-founded, and gave Tether until Nov. 3 to respond. The inquiry centers on a reported $6.3 million payout to Nxum from a Tether deal struck in May 2025 while Hines was helping shape U.S. stablecoin law at the White House.

Blumenthal’s letter builds on an Oct. 14 Wall Street Journal investigation. Hines served as executive director of President Donald Trump’s Presidential Council of Advisers for Digital Assets and was 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.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Tether agreed to pay marketing firm Notorious $415,000 a month, with most of the first payment passed to a wallet used by Nxum and 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 also reported that Hines urged lawmakers to double the law’s compliance window from 18 to 36 months, a change that chiefly benefited Tether, and that messages it reviewed showed him 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.” Blumenthal wrote that the payment structure suggested 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, that said Tether would buy a 25% stake in the firm for $56 million.

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.” Separately, a report released by Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), titled “Tethered to Terrorism,” found that of 846 cryptocurrency wallets sanctioned or targeted for seizure over links to Iran and its regional proxies, 84% transacted exclusively or nearly exclusively in Tether’s USDT stablecoin. The report from Democratic staff on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, where Blumenthal is ranking member, draws on blockchain records for wallets designated by the Treasury.