Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s old firm pumps $10 million into super PAC led by Tether executive
Cantor Fitzgerald, the Lutnick-tied financial services firm that owns a stake in and custodies reserves for the stablecoin issuer, is bankrolling a super PAC led by a Tether executive.
[noted] is a new short-form companion to Citation Needed. I’ve been posting things like this to my microblog for a while — notes on new court filings, campaign finance disclosures, or newsworthy developments that shouldn’t wait for the next recap issue — and you can get a sense of what to expect there.
The new Fellowship crypto PAC has filed its first fundraising disclosure, reporting a $10 million contribution from Cantor Fitzgerald and $1 million from Anchorage Digital. Cantor Fitzgerald is the financial services firm Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick turned over to his two twenty-something sons when he accepted his White House role.
The Fellowship PAC launched in September with an announcement that they had $100 million committed [I93]. They’ve more recently revealed that the PAC is headed by Jesse Spiro, the head of government affairs for the US arm of the Tether stablecoin issuer. Tether and Cantor Fitzgerald are closely linked — Cantor owns a stake in Tether and custodies a substantial portion of its reserves [I71]. Lutnick has personally vouched for the quality (not to mention the existence) of the stablecoin issuer’s reserves [I70], which the company seemed to hope would be sufficient after years of promising but never actually producing a full audit.
As I covered more recently, Commerce Secretary Lutnick’s sale of Cantor Fitzgerald to his children may have been financed in part with a loan from Tether — a transaction that, as law professor and former D.C. ethics counsel Kathleen Clark noted, “is in theory supposed to eliminate a conflict of interest, but in reality it creates a new one.” [I103] The sale to family members itself echoes Trump’s approach: rather than truly divesting, both men transferred control to their direct family when taking their government positions.
Fellowship PAC made its first independent expenditure in the last moments of the general runoff in Georgia’s District 14 special election to replace Marjorie Taylor Greene, spending $300,000 to back Republican Clayton Fuller. While Fuller won with 55.9% of the vote, Fellowship may have stepped in out of fears that the deeply red district might be more pink-tinted this season. Ultimately Fuller won the election with considerably narrower margins than Greene or Trump earned in 2024.
Fellowship also released a slate of endorsements, all of whom are Republicans:
- Alan Wilson, South Carolina governor
- Mike Collins, Georgia Senate
- Julia Letlow, Louisiana Senate
- Pete Ricketts, Nebraska Senate (incumbent)
- Nate Morris, Kentucky Senate
- Blake Miguez, Louisiana House District 5
Since then, they’ve made two additional expenditures: $850,000 to support Nate Morris in his challenge to Andy Barr in the Kentucky Senate Republican primary, and $350,000 to bolster incumbent Nebraska Senator Pete Ricketts’ re-election campaign.
The Fellowship PAC has paid $4.5 million to NXUM Group: $3 million for “Issue Advocacy Advertising”, plus $1.5 million to create the three ads purchased to support the three campaigns mentioned above. NXUM was co-founded by Bo Hines, the former director of Trump’s crypto advisory council [I72, 90], who is now CEO of Tether US [I91].
