RFK Jr. Hits Back as He Comes Under Federal Investigation
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. isn’t mincing words.
The former presidential contender who has become a vocal supporter of former President Donald Trump, is lashing back at word that a federal agency is investigating a 30-year-old story about Kennedy’s treatment of a whale’s carcass in Massachusetts.
An agency that is charged with monitoring the globe’s ocean waters is carrying water for the Kamala Harris election effort, Kennedy declared.
And it’s “all about the weaponization of our government against political opponents,” he said.
Kennedy’s comments came Saturday, after he revealed during an Arizona campaign event that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has launched a probe into a tale told by Kennedy’s granddaughter that was published in a fawning Town and Country magazine profile in 2012.
In the piece, Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy, now 36, told Town and Country about a memory of when she was 6 years old and her grandfather cut the head off a dead whale that had beached in Hyhannis Port.
After decapitating the animal, Kennedy lashed the head to the family minivan for a five-hour drive home to Mount Kisco, New York.
The anecdote comes across as just another piece of Kennedy lore, with all the “gosh, aren’t those folks something” adulation the Kennedys typically get from lifestyle publications like Town and Country.
But since liberals have declared war on RJK Jr. for his powerful Aug. 23 endorsement of Trump, it’s become a federal case — literally.
NOAA confirmed the investigation on Monday, according to CNN.
The investigation was spurred by a complaint from a leftist group called the Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund, which has already announced its endorsement of Harris in the November election.
The group complained in a letter to NOAA that Kennedy cutting off the whale’s head “violated the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and possibly the Endangered Species Act.”
“Furthermore, Mr. Kennedy’s apparent transport of the marine mammal skull from Massachusetts to New York, and therefore across state lines, also represented a felony violation of the Lacey Act, one of the earliest wildlife conservation laws enacted by United States in 1900, which prohibits the transportation of any wildlife, dead or alive, that was reduced to possession in violation of any state, federal, or international regulation or law,” the letter stated.
Kennedy clearly isn’t buying the claim that a resurfaced story about an incident that occurred back in 1994 getting federal attention now was spurred by legitimate concerns.
Neither are a lot of social media users, who called the news another sign of the “deep state” interference in politics.
The deep state has no limit when you have been identified as an enemy of the state. With the apparatus of government staffed almost entirely with Democrats, they will come after you to warn others, do not challenge their control of the levers of power.
— Todd Salvo (@ToddSalvo) September 18, 2024
The NOAA is another politically directed and bloated federal agency that needs to be restructured and downsized.
— Robert Cooper (@robertatlee) September 18, 2024
Ridiculous, they have nothing better to spend our tax dollars on!!!
— Brian Cheek (@BrianDCheek) September 18, 2024
The case is the latest animal-related controversy to arise surrounding RJK Jr. In early August, he went public with a story about putting a bear cub carcass in New York’s Central Park. He was doing it, CNN reported, to pre-empt what he thought would be a negative story about the incident in an upcoming issue of the New Yorker magazine.
The Center for Biological Diversity Fund was one of six groups listed in a July 31 news release from the environmental group Friends of the Earth Action as officially backing the Harris campaign.
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