Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says he is being investigated for whale carcass
GLENDALE, Ariz. – At his first major campaign event for former President Donald Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told a crowd Saturday night that he was being investigated for his handling of a whale carcass decades ago.
Kennedy, who endorsed Trump last month after ending his own independent run for the presidency, said at the event in Glendale, Arizona, that he had received a letter from a national fisheries institute “saying they were investigating me for collecting a whale specimen 20 years ago.” He suggested that the inquiry was politically motivated, and said that he believed he was protected by the statute of limitations.
The whale episode surfaced over the summer after Kennedy acknowledged that he had left a dead bear cub in Central Park in New York City in 2014 as a prank. That drew attention to a 2012 Town & Country article in which his daughter Kick Kennedy said that Kennedy had once chain-sawed the head off a dead whale on the shore of Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, and made the five-hour drive to their home in Mount Kisco, New York, with it affixed to the roof of a minivan.
The mention of the investigation was an odd moment at a campaign stop where Kennedy toggled between urging his followers to support Trump and continuing to try to sell his own policies on health and environmental issues, now with a refreshed MAGA inflection.
“Make America healthy again!” Kennedy, a vaccine skeptic who has promoted a disproved link between vaccines and autism, declared to applause from hundreds in the gymnasium of Arizona Christian University. “He’s going to end the chronic disease epidemic, and he wanted my help to do it.”
When Kennedy was weighing whether to end his bid, he approached both Vice President Kamala Harris and Trump to see if they might offer him a Cabinet position. The Harris campaign declined to meet with him, but he found a receptive audience in Trump, even though they had traded insults as rivals. The former president has not publicly promised Kennedy a Cabinet post but has indicated that he would work with Kennedy on a task force about chronic health issues.
At the event, where he appeared with former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, another former Democrat, Kennedy attributed political polarization in the country to “hypnosis and a psy-op” orchestrated by those in power.
Last month, the political arm of the Center for Biological Diversity, a progressive environmental group, sent a letter to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and called for an investigation into the whale episode, arguing that Kennedy may have broken conservation laws.
It is a violation of federal law to collect parts from a protected marine animal so long as there are still “soft tissues” on the carcass.
Onstage at the rally, Kennedy said he had received a letter shortly after he endorsed Trump from the “National Marine Fisheries Institute.” Kennedy may have been referring to the National Marine Fisheries Service, commonly known as NOAA Fisheries, which oversees marine protection. Representatives of NOAA Fisheries did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Kennedy said at the rally he had written back to his would-be whale investigators, accusing the government of permitting offshore wind farms which kill whales en masse, a claim Trump has also made for which there is no evidence.
Asked after the rally about the investigation, Kennedy declined to provide more details, saying the subject was “gossipy nonsense.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.