He made the claim at a campaign event for former President Donald J. Trump, whom he endorsed after ending his troubled independent bid for the presidency.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. waves to the crowd before speaking at a campaign event for former President Donald J. Trump on Saturday in Glendale, Ariz.
At his first major campaign event for former President Donald J. Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., told a crowd on Saturday night that he was being investigated for his handling of a whale carcass decades ago.
Mr. Kennedy, who endorsed Mr. Trump last month after ending his own independent run for the presidency, said at the event in Glendale, Ariz., 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 Mr. Kennedy acknowledged that he had left a dead bear cub in Central Park in 2014 as a prank. That drew attention to a 2012 Town & Country article in which his daughter Kick Kennedy said that Mr. Kennedy had once chain-sawed the head off a dead whale on the shore of Hyannis Port, Mass., and made the five-hour drive to their home in Mount Kisco, N.Y., with it affixed to the roof of a minivan.
The mention of the investigation was an odd moment at a campaign stop where Mr. Kennedy toggled between urging his followers to support Mr. 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!” Mr. 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 Mr. Kennedy was weighing whether to end his bid, he approached both Vice President Kamala Harris and Mr. 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 Mr. Trump, even though they had traded insults as rivals. The former president has not publicly promised Mr. Kennedy a cabinet post but has indicated that he would work with Mr. Kennedy on a task force about chronic health issues.
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Source: nytimes.com
