According to ChainCatcher, CoinDesk reports that a filing with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) by the Tether-affiliated Super PAC Fellowship reveals that its first expenditure of $300,000 went to Nxum Group, a company co-founded by Tether's US CEO and former Trump administration crypto advisor Bo Hines, along with his father Todd Hines and third-party partners.
This expenditure was used to purchase campaign ads for Georgia Republican House candidate Clay Fuller, around the time Fuller won the special election and succeeded Marjorie Taylor Greene as Representative. Notably, the Fellowship neither publicly announced this expenditure nor included Fuller in its list of public endorsements.
On April 1st of this year, Fellowship appointed Jesse Spiro, Tether's Vice President of Regulatory Affairs in the United States, as the chairman of its committee, officially re-entering the political arena. When the committee was announced last year, it received a total of $100 million in pledged funding, but its FEC disclosure documents currently show a zero balance in the account, and related donations have not yet been disclosed. Tether International responded that it has no affiliation or regulatory relationship with the Fellowship PAC, while Tether U.S. declined to comment.
Regarding the issue of vested interests, Michael Beckel of the political reform organization Issue One stated that Super PAC's payments to founder-affiliated companies are not illegal under US campaign finance rules, provided the services are genuinely provided and the rates are in line with market prices. Mitchell Nobel, the CFO of Fellowship, currently works at Cantor Fitzgerald, a company that manages the assets of Tether's global operations; its former chairman was current Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.
Currently, Fellowship's spending is still far behind that of Fairshake, a leading super PAC in the crypto industry. Fairshake has invested millions of dollars in multiple primaries, while Fellowship's current support is almost entirely for candidates from deep red states.
