New Crypto Council Chief Teamed Up With Sketchy Trump-Themed Meme Coin #CriptoNews

When Donald Trump announced days before Christmas that he was tapping a former college football player and failed congressional candidate to lead a White House “crypto council,” even crypto bros were confused.

“Who the heck is Bo Hines?” one Bitcoin booster posted on X.

As it turns out, the trust fund kid from North Carolina had connections in the crypto world.

Hines, 29, received support in one of his election campaigns from FTX campaign finance fraudster Ryan Salame.

More recently, a group overseen by his company teamed up with the makers of a Trump-themed meme coin called Restore the Republic that launched with a storm of scam accusations.

Hines will serve as executive director of the newly created Presidential Council of Advisers for Digital Assets, which is chaired by the far more prominent venture capitalist David Sacks.

Until now, Hines’s ties to the crypto industry escaped scrutiny.

Hines’s experience with the Trump-themed crypto venture raises questions about whether his appointment could signal looser restrictions on the fringe “meme coins” as the council sets out to deregulate more mainstream crypto projects backed by the likes of Sacks.

Until now, Hines’s ties to the crypto industry escaped scrutiny, in part because Trump announced his appointment in the days before Christmas. His relationship with Restore the Republic has not been previously reported.

Crypto Connections

Trump announced Hines’s selection on Truth Social on December 22 by lauding Hines’s educational background — Yale University, Wake Forest University law school — instead of his crypto chops.

In his home state of North Carolina, Hines may be best known for 2022 and 2024 runs for Congress, in two different districts, as well as a stint as a wide receiver at North Carolina State University before he transferred to Yale.

Despite Trump’s failure to tout them, however, Hines’s links to the crypto world were out in the open for anyone to notice.

As the CEO of the right-wing news organization Today Is America, which he ran since March 2023, provided a quote for an October 23 announcement about a partnership with a Trump-themed meme token called Restore the Republic.

Those were frantic, final days of a campaign that still seemed like it might come down to the wire. According to the press release, an organization called Students for Trump would partner with the meme coin organization to hold events, community forums, and voter outreach programs in swing states.

Students for Trump and Today Is America are deeply intertwined. The student group is overseen by Today In America, according to a LinkedIn posting by a former top official at the company and a separate post on a crypto news clearinghouse about the Restore the Republic coin. And the student group’s homepage is a vertical of the Today Is America website. According to its Instagram bio, Students for Trump is “powered” by Today Is America.

In the announcement of the Restore the Republic meme coin, Hines referred to the Students for Trump partnership in the first person.

“We are excited to join forces with Restore the Republic to amplify our outreach and ensure voters across the country are equipped with the knowledge and tools they need to make informed decisions,” Hines said in a press release.

The press release made it sound as if a trio of civic-minded organizations were coming together around a love of Trump. But in a conversation on X Spaces around the same time, an adviser for the Restore the Republic “team” acknowledged a more contentious recent history involving Trump.

In early August, Restore the Republic launched as a token at the same time that Trump’s sons were teasing the imminent creation of an official Trump crypto project.

Meme coins operate on the edges of a wider, infamously freewheeling cryptocurrency world. The most famous is Dogecoin, a dog-themed token with a shiba inu as its logo that seems to rise and fall on the whims of Elon Musk.

The new Restore the Republic token leaned heavily into Trump iconography on its website, featuring the famous photo of Trump raising his arm after a July assassination attempt and promising rewards for collectors in the form of custom Trump handguns and a dinner with Donald Trump Jr.

Speculators began snapping up the token, which had the same name as a phrase that Trump uttered on the campaign trail, on the hopes that it had the ex-president’s official blessing.

An X post from Ryan Fournier, the founder of Students for Trump, helped fan the flames. “Rumor has it that the official trump coin is out…called Restore the Republic,” Fournier posted, months before the partnership between the coin and the student group was announced.

The market capitalization of the token soared to $155 million within hours of its launch. Later that day, however, it fell just as fast when Trump’s son Eric said the idea that the token was affiliated with his family “absolutely false.”

In the meantime, however, someone snapped up and sold enough of the Trump-themed token to net a cool $4 million.

It was just another dramatic rise and fall in the wild west world of meme coins, which are notorious for hype-driven boom and bust cycles.

As social media users tossed accusations that someone had used the token for a classic “pump and dump” scheme, Fournier defended himself by claiming that “sources” told him the Trumps would link up with the project.

“That is why I said rumor,” Fournier said on X. “I’m not a big crypto guy and I was not in any way involved in this project.”

Making It Official

Restore the Republic tokens never went completely out of circulation, however, and by the end of October their price was on the upswing.

A social media appearance from Donald Trump Jr. may have helped. The morning after the October 2 vice presidential debate, Trump Jr. taped a recording that was posted to the Restore the Republic X account.

Trump Jr. bantered with Hines and Florida entrepreneur Josh McLean about cryptocurrency, complaining that aggressive regulators risked killing a growth sector in the U.S. economy.

After Trump exited the call, McLean addressed the calamitous launch of the Restore the Republic token in August, calling himself both an adviser and “part of the team.”

“It was a crazy launch, some shit happened,” McLean said. “Things didn’t go well. I hate that it didn’t. But at the same time when they didn’t go well, the team went back to work. They came up with a great plan.”

McLean’s other business ventures include a boxing league and company trading in non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, a type of digital asset that works on the same blockchain system as cryptocurrencies.

It is unclear whether Today Is America or Hines and Fournier, who did not return requests for comment, have a financial relationship with the makers of Restore the Republic.

After denying any relationship with the project just two months before, however, Fournier said in the October 23 press release that he was “excited” to partner with Restore the Republic.

“This team is a group of patriots that are dedicated to seeing President Donald J. Trump elected,” he said, “and pushing the America First agenda.”

Salame Support

In the same conversation where he bantered with the Restore the Republic token boosters, Trump Jr. sounded off on the infamous cryptocurrency exchange FTX.

The former president’s son told his interlocutors that FTX had operated as a “100 percent Democrat slush fund” under CEO Sam Bankman-Fried. Hines did not respond — but he might have been in a position to fact-check.

While Bankman-Fried is often associated with millions of dollars spent on Democratic candidates, prosecutors said he used $100 million in stolen money on a bipartisan influence campaign.

The money for Republicans was often routed through a super PAC founded and funded by fellow FTX executive Ryan Salame, which showered millions on GOP candidates, as The Intercept reported at the time.

One of those candidates was Hines, on whose behalf Salame’s super PAC spent more than $500,000 on independent TV and digital ads, according to Federal Election Commission records.

Mixing Business and Politics

During that 2022 campaign, Hines tempered his image as he moved from the primary to general election in a nearly 50-50 purple district. After calling abortion “absolutely murder” and dubbing himself a “MAGA warrior” for Trump, he dropped references to abortion and Trump from his website.

It didn’t work. Hines still came up a few thousand votes short against Democrat Wiley Nickel. In 2024, he ran again in a different congressional district but placed fourth in the Republican primary, after Trump went from teasing support for Hines to endorsing an opponent.

Hines was dogged in his 2022 race by accusations from Democrats that he had never held a real job in his life. He listed a family trust as his only source of income at one point. By the time of his 2024 race, however, Hines said he was the “owner and operator of several successful businesses.”

One role was at Today Is America, the right-wing media company with hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram, which announced Hines as its CEO in March 2023.

Today Is America does not feature any advertisements on its homepage, and Hines did not respond to questions about its business model. Its scattershot mix of content includes college football picks, odes to Trump, and a lead-footed, homophobic attempt at humor called the “Straight Man’s Guide for Pride Month .”

“Wear two pairs of underwear- with creeps lurking behind every corner, it is better to have an extra layer of protection,” the article reads. “Statistics show that unsolicited rectum intrusions increase 300% in the month of June (This is a joke but you definitely believed it).”

Along with Hines, Today Is America listed former George Santos campaign treasurer Jason Boles as chief financial officer and conservative influencer maven Camron Rafizadeh as secretary in corporate records.

If Hines holds Restore the Republic or any other crypto tokens, he could be forced to sell them before reporting to work at the White House. In 2022, the Office of Government Ethics issued an advisory warning that federal employees could not work on cryptocurrency regulation if they owned crypto assets themselves.

That makes the executive branch distinct from Congress, where members are free to trade and own digital assets, though few do. Lobbyists for the crypto industry have asked the ethics office to loosen its rules on crypto regulators as well.

The crypto council, which Hines is set to lead, is chaired by Sacks, the venture capitalist and member of the conservative “PayPal mafia” in Silicon Valley. Sacks has his own presence in the right-wing media landscape, delighting in tweaking liberals on his podcast. That profile helped bring far more attention to Trump’s elevation of Sacks than Hines has received.

In his announcement last month, Trump touted the forthcoming partnership between the men as a boon for the crypto world.

“Bo will work with David to foster innovation and growth in the digital assets space,” Trump said, “while ensuring industry leaders have the resources they need to succeed.”