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GOP Senate candidate, campaigning as truck-driving everyman, travels by private jet
North Carolina Senate nominee Michael Whatley’s committees have spent over $100,000 for use of a private jet linked to a convicted felon
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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.
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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.
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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’