After securing the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate in North Carolina, Michael Whatley launched his general election campaign with an ad that emphasized he was traveling the state in a GMC truck. “Whatley’s driven thousands of miles across North Carolina trying to fix our country and help working families,” the narrator says as Whatley, wearing a flannel shirt, starts the engine. Whatley’s humble approach is contrasted with his Democratic opponent, former Governor Roy Cooper, who is shown in a tuxedo and accused of “siding with national liberals.”
Whatley has spent more than $1.5 million airing the ad statewide, according to estimates by AdImpact.
A more accurate account of Whatley’s travel habits, however, is found amid thousands of pages of campaign finance filings. Those documents reveal that Whatley’s campaign committees have spent over $100,000 since last September on travel in a $2 million private jet. Although efforts were made to obscure the owner of the aircraft, there is a paper trail linking it to Carl Andrew “Drew” Boggs — a felon convicted of defrauding the federal government.
In 2025, the Whatley for Senate campaign reported five payments, ranging from $8,243.10 to $21,615.24, to N5YD LLC for airfare. In 2026, two additional payments to N5YD LLC, for $8,426.28 and $9,575.87 were paid by the Whatley Buckhout Victory Fund, a joint fundraising committee benefiting Whatley and Laurie Buckhout, a Republican candidate for Congress in North Carolina. The most recent payment to N5YD LLC was paid by the Whatley Victory Committee, another Whatley fundraising vehicle. The payment for $19,701.42 on June 23 appears on page 4946 of the Whatley Victory Committee’s July Quarterly filing.
N5YD LLC was registered anonymously in Wyoming in 2022. The first payment by Whatley’s campaign in 2025 lists N5YD LLC’s address as “1613 W Roosevelt Blvd, Monroe, NC 28110-2754.” That is the address of the Boggs Group, a major construction company which was rebranded as TrueRock in 2023.
Subsequent payments to N5YD LLC list a P.O. Box located in Monroe. That P.O. Box is also associated with the Boggs Group and was used by Drew Boggs to make an in-kind contribution of $10,490.58 to the North Carolina Republican Party in 2021, when Whatley was the chairman. Boggs family members use the P.O. Box to register various cars and boats, according to public tax records published by Union County, North Carolina.
The same tax records reveal that N5YD LLC is a shell for a 2001 Cessna 525A valued at $1,931,487. N5YD is the tail number of the jet.
In 2015, Drew Boggs was “sentenced to 30 months in prison… after pleading guilty to conspiracy to defraud the United States Department of Transportation and money laundering conspiracy.” Over a period of 10 years, Boggs and his co-defendants “engaged in a scheme by which they fraudulently obtained federally and state funded construction contracts by falsely certifying that a disadvantaged business enterprise (DBE)… would perform and be paid for [a] portion of the work on those contracts.” Over that time period, Boggs obtained 37 federal contracts worth $87.6 million.
Actually, Boggs’ companies performed the work and paid the DBE, Styx Cuthbertson Trucking, a kickback for facilitating the scheme. There were elaborate efforts to conceal the fraud, including routing the payments through Styx’s bank accounts and “using magnetic decals bearing the ‘Styx’ company logo to cover the ‘Boggs’ logo on company trucks.”
In total, Whatley’s campaign committees have paid $104,749.73 to N5YD LLC for air travel on the Cessna. (Notably, N5YD LLC was formally dissolved in 2023 by Wyoming for tax delinquency.) In addition to the use of the jet, Drew Boggs donated $6,612 to the Whatley Victory Committee in May and June of 2026.
After his guilty plea, political contributions from Drew Boggs have been controversial. In 2014, North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory (R) donated more than $10,000 linked to Boggs and his family to charity. “Taking advantage of a program designed to help disadvantaged businesses is wrong and our campaign will not be associated with these actions,” a campaign spokesperson said. “Therefore… it will be reflected in our next campaign finance report that any contributions from those who have been found guilty for these improper actions will have been donated to the Durham Rescue Mission and the Joe Martin ALS Foundation.”
Drew Boggs was pardoned by President Trump on January 20, 2021, the last day of his first term. “Since his release, Mr. Boggs has rebuilt his company, has employed hundreds of people, and has dedicated countless hours and financial resources to his community,” the White House said in a release.
In addition to travel on the Cessna linked to Boggs, the Whatley Victory Campaign paid an additional $31,247.46 on June 16 to another entity, Old Well Aviation LLC, for private jet travel. According to FAA records, Old Well Aviation LLC owns a Cessna 525 CitationJet. The company is managed by Charlotte-area developers, including Eric Wood, who donated $2,500 to the Whatley Victory Campaign in May 2026.
The Whatley campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Thanks, Judd. Right in my own back yard. NC is full of these folksy phonies.
The rot is everywhere!!