Bo Hines, Trump’s New “Crypto Council” Director, Has Ties to Meme Coin Restore the Republic

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.

Bo Hines, a former college football player and failed congressional candidate, will lead a White House “crypto council,” despite having no experience in the crypto industry.

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.

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, Hines 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