Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says he is being investigated for chainsawing off and collecting the head of a whale carcass in the early aughts.
During a campaign event on Saturday for Donald Trump, the former independent presidential candidate said he “received a letter from the National Marine Fisheries Institute” shortly after endorsing Trump informing him of the probe.
“This is all about the weaponization of our government against political opponents,” he added, telling the crowd that he had responded to the institute’s correspondence with the unfounded allegation, also espoused by Trump, that the government’s permitting of offshore wind farms kills whales en masse.
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Kennedy’s whale saga began after a 2012 interview with his daughter Kick resurfaced in which she described her father decapitating the dead animal and driving five hours across state lines with it affixed to the roof of their car.
Collecting parts from a protected marine animal that still has “soft tissues” on the carcass is against federal law.
In August, the political arm of the Center for Biological Diversity, a left-leaning environmental organization, asked federal authorities to look into Kick Kennedy’s decade-old story, accusing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. of violating the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act.
“There are good reasons why it is illegal for any person to collect or keep parts of any endangered species,” Brett Hartl, the national political director of the organization, wrote in a letter to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “Most importantly, vital research opportunities are lost when individuals scavenge a wildlife carcass and interfere with the work of scientists. This is particularly true of marine mammals, which are some of the most difficult wildlife species in the world to study.”
Hartl also alleged that Kennedy may have violated the Lacey Act, a 1900 law that outlaws the transportation of illegally gathered wildlife, dead or alive, across state lines.
During the Saturday rally, the former presidential candidate did not deny the rumored whale incident and instead suggested the statute of limitations governing the legal codes had passed before dismissing a federal probe into him as “gossipy nonsense.”
