Presidential candidate and conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. derailed the environmental group he was a part of when he aggressively pushed to hire a convicted wildlife smuggler as a staffer. In 2000, Kennedy showed up to a board meeting of the Riverkeeper group to insist on hiring the smuggler, who had just been released from federal prison, against the warnings of his friend and mentor Robert Boyle and several other leaders. Boyle objected that bringing on a man whose criminal activities actively endangered rare bird populations to staff a conservation group was “like hiring a robber as a bank teller,” the Washington Post reported. But Kennedy prevailed, and by the end of the heated meeting, Boyle and seven other board members had resigned. It cleared the way for Kennedy to replace the group’s leadership with loyalist celebrities and socialites instead, and over the next two decades, he would inflate his role at Riverkeeper as he promoted other causes, including the anti-vax activism he’s infamous for now.
