Blumenthal Orders Tether and Nxum to Hand Over Records on $6.3 Million

Letters Set a Nov. 3 Deadline

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), ranking member of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, sent letters on Oct. 22 to Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino and to Nxum Group CEO Todd Hines, the father of former White House crypto official Bo Hines. Both letters, which the subcommittee published alongside the Oct. 22 letter to Tether, order the companies to produce contracts, payment records and communications involving Nxum, Bo Hines and related parties by Nov. 3, 2026. In the letter, Blumenthal writes that a payment of this size to “a firm controlled by the White House official primarily responsible for cryptocurrency policy” implicates federal ethics, anticorruption and lobbying laws.

The demand builds on a Wall Street Journal investigation published Oct. 14. As the letters describe the Journal's findings, Tether agreed in May 2025 to pay Nxum $415,000 a month, and more than $6 million in total moved from Tether to the firm. Hines, then executive director of the White House crypto council, held a one-third stake in Nxum and did not divest it while shaping stablecoin policy. Blumenthal asks Tether to itemize every payment, including any crypto wallet address used, and to hand over records involving Hines from Jan. 20, 2025 to Aug. 9, 2025. Both letters also ask whether the companies discussed Tether taking a stake in Nxum, a question that follows the report that Nxum, while seeking investors, claimed Tether planned to buy a 25% stake for $56 million. The letter to Todd Hines adds that Nxum never registered its lobbying with the House or Senate.

The $6.3 Million Trail Through Bitfinex

The payment trail the letters probe runs through an intermediary. Tether's first installment of $2.49 million moved through Bitfinex on May 11, 2025, routed via Notorious, a marketing firm led by Peter Vincer; Vincer retained $498,000, and the balance reached a wallet tied to Nxum. Two further installments of $2.49 million each followed in December 2025 and April 2026. Gross, the three transfers totaled $7.47 million; net of intermediary fees, Nxum is said to have collected $6.3 million.

Timing is the part Blumenthal's letters press hardest. Hines oversaw White House crypto policy from January 2025 until his resignation on Aug. 9, 2025, a window that covered negotiation of the GENIUS Act, signed on July 18, 2025. Ten days after Hines left, Tether announced on Aug. 19, 2025 that it had hired him as a strategic adviser, and he now runs the company's US operations. Per the letters, Tether began by paying Nxum through Notorious and paid the firm directly only after Hines had left government; Nxum later allegedly offered Vincer more than $300,000 and a share of future Tether payments in exchange for a nondisclosure agreement. Signal messages cited in the reporting show Hines passing GENIUS Act talking points to Nxum partners and lobbying legislators to stretch the compliance window for stablecoin issuers from 18 to 36 months. Both deadlines survived in the final law: the Act takes effect 18 months after adoption, on Jan. 18, 2027, and the restriction on offering a foreign payment stablecoin to US persons bites at 36 months, on July 18, 2028. A Nxum representative has said Hines was uninvolved in Tether business while in government, recused himself and received no Tether payments during that period.

Where This Leaves USDT's US Access

Read against the letter itself, the request is the opening move of a committee that can escalate to subpoenas, and it lands while USDT's access to US users is being defined. The Treasury's comment period on its proposed stablecoin rule, Docket No. TREAS-DO-2026-0496, closed Oct. 19, 2026, and that rule will decide what counts as offering a payment stablecoin to an American and on what terms a foreign issuer must register with the OCC. The CLARITY Act's 49-50 cloture failure on Sept. 15 showed that conflict-of-interest rules covering officials' crypto holdings are now a live legislative fault line. No criminal charge has been filed against Hines, and no referral has gone to the Justice Department or the Office of Government Ethics; the Nov. 3 deadline sets the next measurable checkpoint.