The ad opens with a truck.
Michael Whatley, in a flannel shirt, turns the key on a GMC pickup. "Whatley's driven thousands of miles across North Carolina trying to fix our country and help working families," the narrator says. Then the ad cuts to his Democratic opponent, former Governor Roy Cooper, in a tuxedo, accused of "siding with national liberals."
The message is not subtle. One of these men drives a truck. The other one wears a tuxedo.
Whatley has spent more than $1.5 million airing that ad across North Carolina, according to estimates by AdImpact.
Here is what the flannel shirt is covering up. Since last September, Whatley's campaign committees have spent over $136,000 on private jet travel — including more than $104,000 flying a $1.9 million Cessna that a reporter traced, through a shell company and a P.O. Box, to a construction executive who went to federal prison for defrauding the government and was pardoned by Donald Trump.
That reporting comes from Judd Legum at Popular Information, who went through thousands of pages of campaign finance filings to find it.
$104,749.73 to a shell company in Wyoming
Start with the paper trail, because Whatley's campaign clearly did not want anyone to follow it.
In 2025, the Whatley for Senate campaign reported five payments for "airfare" to something called N5YD LLC. They ranged from $8,243.10 to $21,615.24.
In 2026, two more payments — $8,426.28 and $9,575.87 — went to N5YD LLC from the Whatley Buckhout Victory Fund, a joint fundraising committee that benefits Whatley and Laurie Buckhout, a Republican running for Congress in North Carolina. The most recent payment, $19,701.42 on June 23, came from the Whatley Victory Committee. You can find it on page 4,946 of that committee's quarterly filing.
Add it up: $104,749.73.
N5YD LLC was registered anonymously in Wyoming in 2022. Wyoming is where you go when you don't want your name on a company. But the filings gave it away anyway.
The first payment listed N5YD LLC's address as 1613 W Roosevelt Blvd in Monroe, North Carolina. That is the address of the Boggs Group, a large construction company that rebranded itself as TrueRock in 2023. Later payments switched to a P.O. Box in Monroe — the same P.O. Box the Boggs Group uses, and the same one Drew Boggs used in 2021 to make a $10,490.58 in-kind contribution to the North Carolina Republican Party.
Whatley was the chairman of the North Carolina Republican Party in 2021.
Union County's own public tax records finish the job. They show that N5YD LLC is a shell for a 2001 Cessna 525A valued at $1,931,487. N5YD is the jet's tail number. The company that "owns" the plane is named after the plane.
One more detail worth sitting with: N5YD LLC was formally dissolved by the state of Wyoming in 2023 for tax delinquency. Whatley's campaign has been writing checks to a company that legally stopped existing three years ago.
The man behind the jet went to prison for cheating the government
In 2015, Carl Andrew "Drew" Boggs was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison after pleading guilty to conspiracy to defraud the U.S. Department of Transportation and money laundering conspiracy.
The scheme ran for ten years. Boggs and his co-defendants won federally and state-funded construction contracts by falsely certifying that a "disadvantaged business enterprise" would do part of the work and get paid for it. That program exists to give small, disadvantaged contractors a real shot at public work. Boggs used it as a password.
In reality, Boggs's own companies did the work. The disadvantaged business — a trucking company called Styx Cuthbertson Trucking — got a kickback for going along with it.
The cover-up is the part people remember. Prosecutors described payments routed through Styx's bank accounts, and magnetic decals with the "Styx" logo stuck over the "Boggs" logo on company trucks. Peel off the sticker and the real name is underneath.
Over those ten years, Boggs took in 37 federal contracts worth $87.6 million.
Other North Carolina Republicans decided they didn't want that money. In 2014, Governor Pat McCrory gave away more than $10,000 in contributions tied to Boggs and his family, donating it to the Durham Rescue Mission and the Joe Martin ALS Foundation. "Taking advantage of a program designed to help disadvantaged businesses is wrong and our campaign will not be associated with these actions," a McCrory spokesperson said at the time.
Whatley did not give the flights back. Boggs also donated $6,612 directly to the Whatley Victory Committee in May and June of this year.
Trump pardoned him on the last day of his first term
Drew Boggs was pardoned by President Trump on January 20, 2021 — the final day of Trump's 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.
Whatley has never had a problem with Trump's pardons. He has publicly defended the January 6 pardons, calling the prosecutions a "ridiculous persecution" and backing payments to rioters — including men who were later convicted of child sex crimes.
Now a Trump pardon recipient's jet is how he gets around North Carolina.
And a second jet, from a second donor
The Cessna linked to Boggs isn't the whole bill.
On June 16, the Whatley Victory Committee paid $31,247.46 to Old Well Aviation LLC for more private jet travel. FAA records show Old Well Aviation owns a Cessna 525 CitationJet. The company is managed by Charlotte-area developers — one of them, Eric Wood, donated $2,500 to the Whatley Victory Committee in May 2026.
So the pattern is the same twice over. A donor owns a jet. The donor gives Whatley money. Whatley's committees pay the donor's jet company for flights.
Total private jet spending: about $136,000 since last September.
This is not the first time his story hasn't matched his record
Whatley's whole pitch is that he's the regular guy in the race. The trouble is how often the receipts say otherwise.
He spent a decade lobbying for oil and gas — his firm took $3.5 million, including $1.2 million from energy clients — and his campaign bio doesn't mention the career at all.
He and his wife hold between $163,000 and $445,000 in Duke Energy stock, while Duke has spent the last year asking North Carolina regulators to raise residential power bills.
And when reporters have shown up with questions, he has called the police on them rather than answer.
Popular Information asked his campaign about the jet flights. The Whatley campaign did not respond.
What this actually costs North Carolina
It would be easy to file this under "politician is a hypocrite" and move on. It's worth more than that.
A U.S. Senator's job is to decide who the federal government does business with, who gets a break, and who gets caught. The man whose plane Whatley has been flying on made $87.6 million off federal contracts by faking his way through a program built for disadvantaged businesses — and then got the conviction wiped out by the president whose North Carolina party Whatley was about to chair.
Whatley is asking North Carolinians for a six-year term based on an ad about a pickup truck. He is not telling them who is fueling the jet.
If the truck ad were true, there would be no jet payments to disclose. There are $136,000 of them.
Source
Judd Legum, "GOP Senate candidate, campaigning as truck-driving everyman, travels by private jet", Popular Information, August 24, 2026.
