Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he is under investigation by federal authorities for taking the head from a decapitated whale carcass.
“I received a letter from the National Marine Fisheries Institute saying I’m under investigation for taking a whale specimen 20 years ago,” the former independent presidential candidate said at a campaign event for Republican candidate Donald Trump in Glendale, Arizona on Saturday.
“This is all weaponisation by the government against its political opponents,” he added.
Mr Kennedy, who supported former President Kennedy after dropping out of last November’s election, has come under intense scrutiny in recent weeks after remarks made by his daughter Kick to Town & Country magazine in 2012 about the whale in question resurfaced.
She recounted how the creature washed up on a shoreline near Hyannis Port, Massachusetts: “[He]ran to the shore with a chainsaw, cut off the whale’s head, secured it to the roof of his family’s minivan with bungee cords and drove it five hours to Mount Kisco, New York.”
“Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour out onto the car windows. It was the most disgusting thing on earth. We all had plastic bags over our heads with holes in them and people on the highway would give us the middle finger, and it was a normal thing for us.”
Reports of the beheading caught the attention of the Biodiversity Action Fund, which called for federal authorities to investigate Kennedy. In a letter to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the environmental group said Kennedy “violated the Marine Mammal Protection Act and possibly the Endangered Species Act by illegally decapitating a dead whale in Hyannis Point, Massachusetts, in or about 1994 and transporting it to his home in New York.”
The letter continues: “We hope that NOAA’s Office of Law Enforcement will, at a minimum, ensure that Mr. Kennedy turns over all illegally obtained wildlife that he continues to possess, including the whale skull he took from the Massachusetts coast in 1994. We also urge NOAA to consider all appropriate civil and criminal penalties in light of Mr. Kennedy’s reckless disregard for two of the nation’s most important marine conservation laws.”
Kennedy faced other criticism in August for an unrelated animal-related confession, when he admitted on video to his involvement in the disposal of a dead bear cub in New York City’s Central Park more than a decade ago.
Recalling the incident, Kennedy said he picked up the bear’s carcass and loaded it into his van, intending to skin and eat it later, but ran out of time to bring the bear home and decided to make it look like a bicyclist had hit it instead.
“I thought it would be interesting for whoever discovered it,” Kennedy said.
