Environmental group asks federal agency to investigate RFK Jr. for allegedly strapping severed whale head to roof of car in 1990s
Former Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. watches his former running mate Nicole Shanahan speak during a campaign event at the Henry J. Kaiser Event Center in Oakland, Calif., on March 26, 2024. (Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — An environmental group is calling for a federal agency to investigate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who allegedly used a chainsaw to cut off the head of a dead whale, strapped it to the roof of his minivan, and drove it across state lines roughly three decades ago when he was in his 40s.
On Monday, the Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund, a nonprofit group, wrote a letter to directors of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration asking them to investigate Kennedy for his alleged actions, which his daughter, Kick Kennedy, recounted to Town & Country in a 2012 interview. The story resurfaced this week amid tabloid reports about Kick Kennedy’s dating life.
According to the Town & Country piece, “word got out that a dead whale had washed up on Squaw Island in Hyannis Port, [Massachusetts].”
“Bobby — who likes to study animal skulls and skeletons — ran down to the beach with a chainsaw, cut off the whale’s head, and then bungee-corded it to the roof of the family minivan for the five-hour haul back to Mount Kisco, New York,” according to the article.
A spokeswoman for Kennedy did not respond to a request for comment.
Kick Kennedy told the outlet, “Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet. We all had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. last week suspended his independent presidential campaign and endorsed Republican Donald Trump. Trump’s campaign announced later that Kennedy would join his presidential transition team.
In the letter to the NOAA, Brett Hartl, national political director for the Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund, argued that Kennedy, a former environmental lawyer, violated the Marine Mammal Protection Act and possibly the Endangered Species Act.
“We hope that the NOAA Office of Law Enforcement, at a minimum, is able to ensure that Mr. Kennedy surrenders any and all illegally obtained wildlife that he continues to possess, including the whale skull he took from the Massachusetts beach in 1994,” Hartl wrote, according to a copy of the letter he provided to ABC News.
“Given Mr. Kennedy’s reckless disregard for the two most important marine conservation laws in the United States, we ask that NOAA consider all appropriate civil and criminal penalties as well,” he wrote.
Representatives for the NOAA did not respond to an emailed question about whether the agency had decided to investigate Kennedy.
The resurfaced whale anecdote is the second story regarding Kennedy’s handling of wild animals that has drawn attention and scrutiny this summer.
Earlier this month, he told Roseanne Barr that in 2014 he jokingly planted a dead bear cub in Central Park after picking up the cub from the side of the road and putting it in the back of his vehicle.
(WASHINGTON) — Vice President Kamala Harris is set to release her economic agenda on Friday following calls for her campaign to zero in on policy after their unprecedented rise to the top of Democratic ticket.
Harris is set to outline her plans at an event in Raleigh, North Carolina — a pivotal battleground state both Harris and former President Donald Trump will work to win in November. Among the economic policies Harris is set to announce is a plan to provide up to $25,000 in down payment support for first-time homeowners, according to a campaign official.
The campaign is vowing that during her first term, the Harris-Walz administration would provide working families who have paid their rent on time for two years and are buying their first home up to $25,000 in down-payment assistance, with more generous support for first-generation homeowners.
Harris is also set introduce is a federal ban on “corporate price gouging” on food and groceries, the campaign said.
“In her first 100 days, Vice President Harris will work to enact a plan to bring down Americans’ grocery costs and keep inflation in check,” the campaign said.
Harris will work to raise the minimum wage and end taxes on tips, her campaign said. Other Harris plans will deal with prescription drug costs and housing costs.
Her plans are being sold as a way to bring down everyday costs for Americans.
Harris’ announcement comes on the heels of her first joint appearance with President Joe Biden since he stepped down as the Democratic Party’s nominee. Questions are mounting on whether or not she will choose to either distance herself or embrace the current administration’s “Bidenomics.”
The campaign has provided few specific details about Harris’ economic agenda — but if Thursday’s remarks with Biden, which centered around lowering drug costs, are any indication of if she will choose to continue the president’s core economic positions, it would seem a total revamp is not in the future.
For her part, Harris has maintained an interest in expanding popular Biden-era proposals such as the child tax credit and has shown staunch support of labor unions. Under the current administration, she has taken on reducing medical and student debt.
Harris’ economic plan will provide a split screen with Trump, who touched on his economic priorities in remarks on Wednesday. He has already criticized Harris for “copying” some of his own proposals after she announced eliminating taxes on tips in Las Vegas on Saturday, the same city he first mentioned it.
“She’s doing a plan, you know she’s going to announce it this week, maybe. She’s waiting for me to announce it so she can copy it,” said Trump while outlining his own broad policy ideas in Asheville, North Carolina on Wednesday. “Like, remember a couple days ago, and ‘we will have no tax on tips!’ I said, ‘that was my plan!”
Harris will also direct her administration to crack down on mergers and acquisitions between big food corporations, another way for the campaign to continue to highlight her role as a prosecutor.
The vice president has already distanced herself from some of her former positions laid out in her 2020 presidential bid. Her campaign has remained ambiguous over her support of banning fracking and Medicare for All, which she had previously espoused.
(WASHINGTON) — When Americans imprisoned in Russia returned to U.S. soil late Thursday, standing right there to greet them was the likely Democratic presidential nominee, Kamala Harris.
The vice president, along with President Joe Biden, who ended his own campaign and handed her the party baton, greeted Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and Paul Whelan, among others on the Joint Base Andrews tarmac even before they embraced their families.
The late-night scene underscored the diplomatic victory the White House had just scored — and how it was putting Harris front and center as her nascent campaign launches, trying to enhance her credibility on the world stage against Donald Trump’s attacks that she would be treated as a “play toy.”
“This is just an extraordinary testament to the importance of having a president who understands the power of diplomacy and understands the strength that rests in understanding the significance of diplomacy and strengthening alliances,” Harris said Thursday night — a statement that could be read both as praise of Biden and a knock on the former president’s foreign policy, which is skeptical of working with allies.
In a May Truth Social post, Trump claimed Gershkovich “will be released almost immediately after the Election, but definitely before I assume Office. Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, will do that for me but not for anyone else.”
The prisoner exchange, which also freed Alsu Kurmasheva, a Russian-American journalist, and Vladimir Kara-Murza, a legal permanent U.S. resident, was the product of months of intense diplomacy that gained true traction in the last couple of weeks and involved several different countries, including Germany and Slovenia.
But the breakthrough came amid a turbulent presidential race between Trump and Harris, who has been blitzing the campaign trail since Biden bowed out of the contest.
Besides swiftly greeting the freed prisoners and speaking Thursday night, administration officials were also quick to highlight her role in the historic deal, considered one of the biggest swaps to take place since the Cold War and significant enough to break through an incessant news cycle surrounding the election.
“Both President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have made the return of unjustly detained American hostages an absolute priority, and in this particular case, Vice President Harris actually had an opportunity to engage with Chancellor [Olaf] Scholz earlier this year at an opportune and timely moment at the Munich Security Conference where she talked about this issue with him,” national security adviser Jake Sullivan said at the White House Thursday, referring to Harris’ interaction with Germany’s leader.
“I’ve sat in the Oval Office more times than I can count over the course of the past years providing briefings and updates on this and getting peppered with questions by both the president and the vice president thinking through the strategy, iterating the approach, which she was a participant in very much, a core member of the team that helped make this happen,” he added.
Trump, for his part, downplayed the exchange soon after news broke.
“So when are they going to release the details of the prisoner swap with Russia How many people do we get versus them? Are we also paying them cash? Are they giving us cash (Please withdraw that question, because I’m sure the answer is NO)?” Trump posted on his social media platform.
The White House has insisted no cash was exchanged nor was there any sanctions relief for Russia.
Still, the Harris-Trump race is expected to carry on, largely unaffected by the exchange, historic as it is.
Trump is a defined entity, spending decades in the limelight and four years in the White House, after which he has retained a stubborn and iron grip on the GOP.
Harris, while she is still defining herself as a presidential candidate, appears largely set to introduce herself as a prosecutor going after a convicted felon with a focus on policies emphasizing “freedom.”
She did tie herself to the administration’s record on released prisoners before news broke Thursday, saying in Houston that, “As vice president, it has been my honor to work alongside our president, Joe Biden, to bring home more than 70 Americans in the last three and a half years.”
The broad contours of the race are still expected to remain the same, strategists in both parties said.
“No, I don’t think so,” one former Trump campaign official who remains in touch with his current team said when asked if there was any electoral fallout from the swap. “I don’t think it moves the needle diplomatically.”
“I’d be shocked if bit did,” one Democratic strategist said when asked the same question. “This isn’t the Iran hostage situation that riveted people for 444 days and created Nightline and other alternative time news offerings.”
(CHICAGO) — When then-Sen. Barack Obama took the stage on Aug. 28, 2008, to accept the Democratic nomination for president, he did not mention the historic nature of his run. While he gave a nod to his midwestern middle-class upbringing and his Kenyan roots, the man who became the first Black president of the United States urged voters to unite and declared that the campaign was not about him.
“I stand before you tonight because all across America something is stirring. What the naysayers don’t understand is that this election has never been about me. It’s been about you,” Obama said.
Fifteen years later, when Obama took the DNC stage on Tuesday night, he delivered a resounding endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris for president, Obama struck a similar tone. He did not explicitly discuss Harris’ racial identity as a Black and South Asian woman or her gender identity like Hillary Clinton did on Monday night when the former Democratic nominee passed the torch to Harris with a reference to breaking the “glass ceiling.”
“Kamala Harris won’t be focused on her problems – she’ll be focused on yours,” Obama said.
Harris, who embarked on a historic run of her own, would become the first female president and second president of color if elected in the 2024 general election.
She has spoken with pride about her Jamaican and Indian heritage, and when she ran for president in 2020, her campaign logo was modeled after that of Shirley Chisholm – the first Black woman to run for president – and when she addressed the DNC as vice presidential nominee, she paid tribute to the women of color in politics who came before her.
It is unclear if Harris will focus on her historic run when she delivers her own acceptance speech at the DNC on Thursday. But according to experts who study race, politics and the White House, Harris has so far not made her identity a central part of her 2024 campaign like Clinton did in 2016 and like Harris did in 2020 and has instead, taken a page out of the playbook that propelled the first Black president to the White House.
“[Like Obama], Harris is letting other people talk about her identity. So you’re putting out the surrogates,” Nadia Brown, a professor of government at Georgetown University who studies Black women in politics, told ABC News. “She’s not shying away from her identity, but she’s not centering this entire race and campaign on her identity.”
But is this a winning strategy?
‘Not more of the same’
Since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed Harris last month, there has been a surge in “enthusiasm” for the Democratic ticket that crossed “generational boundaries,” according to Leah Wright Rigueur, a professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, who studies race and the American presidency. This shift in energy was evidenced by the $310 million fundraising haul that her campaign raised in July alone, Rigueur said.
This surge in enthusiasm is reflected in an ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll released on Sunday, which found that 50% overall say they’d be enthusiastic or satisfied if Harris were elected, compared with 36% who said that about Biden in early 2023.
According to Rigueur, the shift in “energy” is not merely a reflection of voters being excited about the historic nature of Harris’ run, but also indicative of the dissatisfaction with another matchup between Biden and former President Donald Trump – “a race between two really old white guys.”
“I think there is a real kind of excitement about the possibility of what Kamala Harris’ presidency represents,” Rigueur told ABC News. “And I think it’s also fair to say that it’s not simply that she is a woman or that she is Black or that she is Indian that is driving this enthusiasm, but instead the sensibility that … she’s refreshing; that she is new; that she is young, and that she’s not more of the same.”
But on the other hand, Brown said that like Obama, Harris has to strike a “balance” because in working to build the “rainbow coalition” she needs – one that includes independents and Trump-leaning voters – Harris is also navigating racism and the reality that some Americans are “not comfortable” with having a woman of color as president.
While “not more of the same” appeals to some voters, Brown said that for others, “it could be alienating.” This, according to Brown, is part of what informs why Harris has been focused on policy in her wider pitch to battleground state voters and has not centered the conversation around her own identity.
In her stump speeches and campaign ads so far, Harris has touted her middle-class roots – much like Obama did in 2008 – in an effort to connect with voters and make the case that she knows what it’s like to work hard, Brown said.
“She grew up in a middle-class home. She was the daughter of a working mom and she worked at McDonald’s while she got her degree,” a Harris ad that touts her goals to lower health care costs and make housing more affordable says. “Being president is about who you fight for and she’s fighting for people like you.”
According to Rigueur, Harris’ strategy to focus on policy and the people, instead of the candidate, is guided by an understanding that there “is a burgeoning of a movement that sees Kamala Harris as its vehicle, not its endgame.”
“There is something novel about Kamala Harris, and it’s something that she has chosen not to emphasize in her campaign,” Rigueur said. “And I actually think that’s a smart decision [that] she’s chosen not to emphasize it, and she doesn’t need to emphasize it because it’s so apparent – it is the elephant in the room.”
‘The Obama effect’
According to Rigueur, Harris is also navigating a political landscape where “the Obama effect” is at play, where there is “an emotional difference” between new generations who grew up with a Black president, “as opposed to, say, my grandmother, who never thought that she would live to see a Black man become President of the United States.”
“I think this comes out too, in attitudes towards what people think about [when it comes to] change and progress,” Rigueur said.
Brown echoed this notion.
“People put their hopes and dreams, I think, unrealistically, on Obama, because there just wasn’t a large civic understanding about how politics works,” she said. “Just the symbolism of having the first Black president was enough for many people that they didn’t question or look into his policy preferences. And I think the difference today is, yeah, people, know.”
And this is what Brown, who is conducting research at the 2024 DNC this week, found through interviews with protesters about how they feel about a Harris presidency and whether her racial or gender identity is something that inspires them.
Brown said she was “surprised” by how many young people of color expressed that they “don’t care” about Harris’ identity and are instead concerned with her politics, particularly her stance on the Israel-Hamas war.
“There’s a large number of people I’ve been surveying – talking to, here – who really disdain these boxes, right? They don’t want to, you know, identify as voting for a woman because they are a woman, and they want to talk about policy,” Brown said.
According to the latest ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll released Sunday, 38% of Americans say that having a woman serve as president would be a good thing for the country, far more than the 14% who see it as a bad thing. The rest, 47%, say it makes no difference.
The poll also found that support from Black people has swung by 12 points in Harris’ direction, from +60 for Biden in July to +72 for Harris now. But Brown said having a Black candidate is not enough – particularly in a post-Obama world.
“Black voters want more,” she said, adding that Harris’ strategy has shifted and she is “going down a different path” in 2024 than she did during her 2020 presidential campaign by making more efforts to speak authentically to Black voters.
“Being in communities with Black people like going to HBCUs, showing up at these Black civil rights organizing spaces, talking about black maternal health,” she added. “Some of these things are showing it’s not that I’m Black, but I actually am part of these communities.”
