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Robert F Kennedy Jr promises to not ‘take sides’ with respect to 9/11 if elected president
by Evelyn Reynolds 5 July 2024, 19:11
Robert F Kennedy Jr has made a startling pledge to not “take sides” with respect to the September 11 terrorist attacks if his long-shot presidential campaign vaults him to the White House.“My take on 9/11: It’s hard to tell what is a conspiracy theory and what isn’t. But conspiracy theories flourish when the government routinely lies to the public,” Kennedy wrote on Friday in a post on X in reference to the deadliest terrorist attack ever aimed at the US. “As president I won’t take sides on 9/11 or any of the other debates.“But I can promise … that I will open the files and usher in a new era of transparency.”The attacks killed nearly 3,000 people in 2001 after terrorists hijacked and crashed passenger planes into New York’s World Trade Center, the Pentagon in Washington DC and a field in Pennsylvania.Kennedy’s decision to revisit one of the most traumatic subjects in American history came just three days after the noted conspiracy theorist responded to an allegation that he sexually assaulted a babysitter previously in his employ by saying: “I’m not a church boy” and “I am who I am.”That allegation – reported in Vanity Fair – came amid growing scrutiny of his independent run for president, which has fueled worries among Democrats and Republicans that he could decide November’s election by pulling votes away from Joe Biden, Donald Trump or both in key states.Friday’s statement on X was not the first time Kennedy had expressed dubiousness about the US’s official account of 9/11. In a podcast interview in September, he refused to say al-Qaida carried out the attacks – as the terrorist organization acknowledged and investigators determined long ago.Kennedy wrote on Friday that he was prompted to speak out by a recent report from the CBS news program 60 Minutes which chronicled how a man identified by the FBI as a Saudi intelligence agent filmed locations in the center of Washington just three months before 9/11.A court action from family members of September 11 victims, who contend that the Saudi government was complicit in the terrorist attacks, brought the footage to light. Saudi rulers deny the victims’ families’ claims.For his part, Kennedy on Friday described himself as “agnostic” concerning 9/11, so-called UFOs “and other contentious topics”.“My issue is transparency,” Kennedy added in a related follow-up post on X.Kennedy is polling at less than 10% of the national vote and is highly unlikely to win the presidency, according to FiveThirtyEight’s average.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHis relation to his father, Robert F Kennedy – the New York senator who was assassinated in 1968 – and uncle John F Kennedy, who was president at the time of his 1963 assassination, has afforded his campaign attention. So has his marriage to actor and comedian Cheryl Hines.In addition to his 9/11 skepticism, peddling falsehoods about Covid-19 and vaccine safety has seemingly undermined Kennedy’s effort to attract wider support. And so have outlandish claims such as linking antidepressants to school shootings and asserting that certain chemicals in water make children transgender.The 27 June presidential debate – marked by a calamitous Biden performance that left his party in a panic as well as Trump’s rapid-fire delivery of lies and half-truths – did little to improve Kennedy’s standing.A recent HarrisX/Forbes poll found a paltry 18% of voters were more likely to vote for a third-party candidate after the debate.“Whatever shaking of the box happened with the debate, these voters aren’t really yet thinking about RFK Jr or any of the third-party candidates,” HarrisX chief executive officer Dritan Nesho later said. “None of the tickets are prominent enough at this stage to be able to capture a good share of vote – at least that’s what we’re seeing in polls right now.” More
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Robert F Kennedy Jr brushes off sexual assault allegation: ‘I am who I am’
by Evelyn Reynolds 2 July 2024, 21:10
Robert F Kennedy Jr has responded to an allegation that he sexually assaulted an employee by stating: “I am not a church boy,” as scrutiny grows over his long-shot run for the presidency.The independent candidate, who is seen as a threat by both the Biden and Trump campaigns, made the statement after his former babysitter told Vanity Fair that Kennedy assaulted her at his home in 1998.Eliza Cooney, who worked for Kennedy and his then wife as a live-in nanny at the family’s home in Mount Kisco, New York, said Kennedy touched her leg at a business meeting and later appeared shirtless in her bedroom before asking her to rub lotion on his back.A few months later, Kennedy blocked Cooney in the kitchen “and began groping her”, Vanity Fair reported. Cooney told the magazine that Kennedy touched her inappropriately.“My back was to the door of the pantry, and he came up behind me,” Cooney said.“I was frozen. Shocked.”The assault was interrupted, Cooney said, when a male worker entered the kitchen.Asked about the sexual assault allegation on the Breaking Points podcast, Kennedy said: “The [Vanity Fair] article is a lot of garbage.”He added: “Listen, I have said this from the beginning. I am not a church boy. I am not running like that.“I said in my … I had a very, very rambunctious youth. I said in my announcement speech that I have so many skeletons in my closet that if, if they could all vote, I could run for king of the world.“So, you know, Vanity Fair is recycling 30-year-old stories. And, I’m not, you know, going to comment on the details of any of them. But it’s, you know, I am who I am.”Asked if he was denying that he assaulted Cooney, Kennedy said: “I’m not going to comment on it.”The Kennedy campaign did not respond to a Guardian request for comment.Cooney said she kept the alleged assault secret until the #MeToo movement prompted many women to come forward with stories of abuse in 2017. She told her mother, and after Kennedy announced his campaign for the presidency in 2023 Cooney told two friends and a lawyer, Elizabeth Geddes. Geddes did not respond to a request for comment.Kennedy, 70, initially ran against Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination before launching a campaign as an independent in October last year.As the son of Robert F Kennedy, the US senator for New York who was assassinated in 1968, and the nephew of John F Kennedy, who was assassinated while serving as president in 1963, Kennedy’s campaign drew widespread attention but has been littered with controversies.In July 2023 a video surfaced of Kennedy making false claims that Covid-19 was “ethnically targeted” to attack Black people and white people while sparing Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people, while Kennedy has also claimed that wifi causes “leaky brain”.He has also linked antidepressants to school shootings, and in 2023 Kennedy claimed that chemicals in water are making kids transgender.Kennedy, a former environmental lawyer, is polling at 9.1% of the national vote, according to FiveThirtyEight’s average, and is highly unlikely to win the presidency.But both the Biden and Trump campaigns fear he could pull votes away from them in key states. Kennedy will be on the ballot in Michigan, a crucial swing state which the president won by 150,000 votes in 2020, and is working to gain ballot access in Wisconsin, which Biden won by 20,000 votes. More
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‘They always got away with it’: new book reveals Kennedys’ shocking treatment of women
by Evelyn Reynolds 2 July 2024, 07:02
“The whole lot of Kennedys were lady-killers, and they always got away with it,” baseball star Joe DiMaggio, who blamed the political dynasty for the death of his ex-wife, Marilyn Monroe, told his biographer. “They’ll be getting away with it a hundred years from now.”Death by air crash. Death by water. Death by suicide. These are just some of the fates of women who have associated with the Kennedys, as chronicled by investigative journalist Maureen Callahan in Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed, a book published on Tuesday that explores the “real Kennedy Curse” and reads like a grisly soap opera.Just as America’s founders have recently undergone a reckoning over race, Callahan argues that the family often treated as political royalty should face a reckoning over gender. In her account, misogyny runs through the Kennedys like a stick of rock with physical and psychological abuse spanning generations. And Camelot uses its power and wealth to ruthlessly control the narrative.Callahan writes: “When a life-size bronze statue of JFK was unveiled in DC in 2021, not one bit of news coverage addressed his treatment of women. Not one journalist, essayist, political writer, or cultural critic asked whether this was a man deserving, in our new era, of such a memorial. Not one asked what kind of message his continued celebration sends to women and girls, now and in the future. Ask not, indeed.”Most topically, the book features John F Kennedy’s nephew, Robert F Kennedy Jr, currently running as an independent candidate for president with a female running mate, Nicole Shanahan. It questions why he has been criticised for his anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and antisemitic statements “but not for his lifelong mistreatment of women”.Ask Not tells how Mary Richardson, a talented architect with looks evocative of Jackie Kennedy, married Robert in 1994 and had four children with him. She loved the idea of being a Kennedy but found her husband rarely present: his job did not require travel but he travelled all the time.“Gaslit. That’s how Mary felt,” Callahan writes. “The more pain she was in, the worse Bobby treated her. Some days he wanted a divorce; others, he wanted to bring another woman into their bed, an idea that left her humiliated. She rejected him outright.View image in fullscreen“One day Mary had a female friend over and Bobby sauntered in, right out of the shower, and dropped the towel around his waist, exposing himself. Mary had long suspected he was cheating on her, but he would always deny it. He’d tell her she was crazy, that she was the one destroying their marriage and driving him away. Was it any wonder he never wanted to be home?”Mary found Robert’s diaries. In the back pages were lists of women with whom Robert had had flings. The book elaborates: “He ranked them from one to ten, as if he were a teenager. Ten, Mary knew, was for full-on intercourse. ‘My lust demons,’ he wrote, were his greatest failing.“He used the word ‘mugged’ a lot – women who, he wrote, just came up to him on the street and said, How about it? If they had sex, he considered himself mugged, a passive victim of aggressive women.“There were so many – astronomical numbers, Mary said, and she knew a lot of them: The celebrated actress who came to their house and went on vacations with her family. The older model who was always around. The socialite whose husband was one of Bobby’s good friends. A gorgeous royal. The wife of a very famous man. A lawyer. A doctor. An environmental activist. All these beautiful, accomplished women. How could Mary compete?”Mary became distraught, weeping and drinking and struggling to get out of bed, the book says. Robert tried to forcibly hospitalise her, telling her that she would be “better off dead”. Callahan interviewed Mary’s therapist, Sheenah Hankin. When Robert asked for Mary to be diagnosed as mentally ill, Hankin refused, telling him: “Your wife isn’t mentally ill. She is angry and depressed, but she is not ill.”Robert began dating the actor Cheryl Hines, who played Larry David’s wife on Curb Your Enthusiasm. He cut off Mary’s credit card and access to cash. Broke, she had to ask other mothers for an extra $20 so she could buy petrol and groceries.Finally, she hanged herself at home. The book recounts: “Mary put on her yoga clothes and sandals, walked out to her barn, stacked three metal crates atop each other, then used a metal ladder to tie a hangman’s knot around the rafter. When she was found that afternoon, Mary’s fingers were stuck inside the rope around her neck. She had changed her mind. She had tried to save herself.”Mary’s siblings insisted that her depression had been a direct result of her husband’s cheating and neglect, his threats to take the children and leave her with nothing, “bringing the full weight of the Kennedy family to bear against her”.Robert, however, portrayed Mary to the world as a disconsolate alcoholic. In his eulogy, he took no responsibility for the anguish that his adultery had caused her. He said: “I know I did everything I could to help her.”Against her family’s wishes, Mary was buried in the Kennedy family plot in Massachusetts near Eunice Kennedy Shriver, sister of John F Kennedy. But, Callahan writes, “one week later, in the middle of the night, without telling Mary’s siblings or obtaining the required legal permitting, Bobby Kennedy Jr had Mary’s coffin dug up and moved seven hundred feet away … Mary was left to face traffic, no headstone marking her grave, buried alone”.The title of Ask Not is a nod to the most celebrated line from John F Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural address: “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.” America’s 35th president is shown in an unflattering light as a philanderer who exploited his position to prey on young women.View image in fullscreenMimi Beardsley was 19 and working in the White House press office when John took her to a bedroom in the private residence, pushed her on to Jackie Kennedy’s bed and took her virginity. It was the first encounter of many, Callahan writes: “Mimi would be welcomed upstairs only when the First Lady was away, and it was her job to remind him of simple pleasures: small talk, shared bubble baths, and sex, hasty though it always was.”Callahan notes that, when Beardsley published a memoir, Once Upon a Secret: My Affair with President John F Kennedy and Its Aftermath, it was pilloried by the media but became a New York Times No 1 bestseller. Robert Dallek, a Kennedy biographer, described Beardsley as “entirely credible” and told the Washington Post: “You’re not going to put the genie back in the bottle anymore. This has become part of the public discourse.”John’s son, John Kennedy Jr, also features in the narrative as a serial risk-taker. With film star looks and charm, he was billed as the world’s most eligible bachelor. He began a relationship with Carolyn Bessette, director of publicity for Calvin Klein, but there were jarring ups and downs. “She was underweight and anxious all the time, using antidepressants and cocaine,” according to the book.Carolyn observed John Jr’s arrogance, thoughtlessness and reckless driving up close. “There was the time Carolyn and John got pulled over on the Massachusetts Turnpike, the car reeking with the smell of pot, a starstruck cop letting them go without even a warning.“‘There’s an unwritten rule in Massachusetts,’ John told her, ‘whereby members of my family can commit murder and mayhem’ – after all, decades earlier his uncle Ted had left a young woman to die in three feet of water – ‘and nobody bats an eye.’”Nevertheless, the couple married in 1996 after a rehearsal dinner where, the book recounts, Carolyn’s mother rose and made a stunning toast. “I don’t know if this marriage is good for my daughter,” she said. “I don’t know if John is right for her.”Three rocky years later, John Jr wanted Carolyn to accompany him to a family wedding on Cape Cod. Against her better judgment, she agreed to fly with him in the small plane he was still learning to pilot. “Carolyn said this to family members, friends, the waitress at their favorite restaurant in Martha’s Vineyard. She didn’t think her husband had the patience, the diligence, the attention span, and, really, the humility to be a good pilot.”View image in fullscreenShe was tragically vindicated. John Jr did not file a flight plan and cut off all communication with air traffic control. An American Airlines flight had to divert to avoid a midair collision. John Jr kept climbing and could soon not tell up from down.“The plane went into a graveyard spiral, falling 900 feet per minute. Carolyn and [her 34-year-old sister] Lauren would have known they were going to die. The sheer force of gravity and speed would have been terrifying as they spun at 200 miles per hour, nose first, into the ocean.”Once again, Callahan writes, the myth-making Camelot machine ensured that, in the 25 years since the crash, Carolyn has been cast as a “drug-addled harridan who made the last days of America’s prince so miserable.“And, so goes the implication: if John Jr hadn’t been so miserable he wouldn’t have been so distracted, and if he hadn’t been so distracted he wouldn’t have crashed the plane. This has become conventional wisdom, accepted as fact, and it’s left Carolyn’s sister Lauren a footnote – still more collateral damage.”One of the family’s darkest chapters unfolded in 1969 when Senator Edward Kennedy accidentally drove off a bridge in Chappaquiddick, an island in Massachusetts. His car flipped upside down into a pond he swam to safety. His passenger, a 28-year-old aide named Mary Jo Kopechne, died inside the water-filled car. Kennedy did not seek help at the nearest house nor report the incident to authorities for 10 hours.“At the inquest,” Callahan notes, “John Farrar, the diver who recovered Mary Jo’s body the next afternoon, testified that Mary Jo had not drowned but had suffocated to death. He said she had been alive for at least an hour in the water, maybe longer.”Kopechne could have been saved. Yet, the author argues, that criminal act was successfully transformed into “Ted’s tragedy”, a terrible accident that unfairly denied him the presidency. He became revered as the “lion of the Senate” instead. She adds: “Ted Kennedy served out the rest of his life in Congress and was given a statesman’s funeral with wall-to-wall news coverage, while Kopechne’s name was barely mentioned.”Drawing on archives, interviews with surviving family members and friends, and biographies, memoirs and contemporaneous news reports, Callahan details the stories of several more women whose lives were upended by the Kennedys. Some were involved in notorious affairs and scandals that made lurid headlines; others became tragedies that were marginalised and mostly forgotten.The New York-based author observes: “Any victims who dare to fight back will find themselves confronting the awesome power of the Kennedy machine, one that recasts any woman, no matter how wealthy or famous or powerful, as crazy, spiteful, vengeful; a drug addict, a viper, a seductress.“Whatever grievous harm a Kennedy man may have done to her, the message remains clear: She was asking for it. It was her fault. Thus Camelot, that fairy tale of Kennedy greatness and noble men, still stands.”
Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed is out now More
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RFK Jr claims Republicans, Democrats and CNN conspired to exclude him from debate
by Evelyn Reynolds 27 June 2024, 15:19
Robert F Kennedy Jr, the independent US presidential candidate polling at about 8%, won’t be at tonight’s Biden-Trump TV smackdown in Atlanta. But he’s not taking the diss quietly, and has accused debate host CNN of colluding with the major party campaigns to exclude him.In an email statement on Wednesday, the Kennedy campaign claimed that 71% of Americans want to see him on the debate stage, and in an act of counter-programming he plans an alternative “real” debate on Elon’s Musk’s Twitter/X platform at the same time.“The American people want leaders who trust them to make up their own minds,” Kennedy said. “Instead, our last two presidents are restricting voters from choosing anyone other than themselves. Presidents Biden and Trump have sucked trillions of dollars from the pockets of working people and Americans deserve to hear from the one candidate who can hold them to account.”Kennedy’s anger and frustration at what he describes as his exclusion despite six qualifying polls and confirmed ballot access in five states – with Democratic legal challenges to his inclusion in five more, including one in New Jersey under the state’s “sore loser law” – comes as Democrats accuse him of being a political stooge for Republicans.“RFK Jr was recruited to run by Maga Republicans, is being propped up by Trump’s largest donor, and his own campaign staff has said their goal is to hurt President Biden,” Matt Corridoni, a spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee, told CBS News.Corridoni said Kennedy had “no real grassroots support, no pathway to 270 electoral votes, and his campaign is resorting to a pattern of deception and shortcuts to circumvent state rules for independent candidate ballot access”.Biden supporters worry Kennedy’s famous name and his history of environmental advocacy could sway voters from the left. His family members are largely against his candidacy, which they have made clear in public statements and by visiting the Biden White House en masse on St Patrick’s Day in March.But Republicans also have not welcomed his quixotic intervention in a tight race that could serve to siphon off vital votes from both candidates. Donald Trump has described him as “far more LIBERAL than anyone running as a Democrat, including West and Stein,” referring to third-party candidates Cornel West and Jill Stein.But Kennedy, who filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission in April claiming the Biden and Trump campaigns and CNN violated federal campaign laws in scheduling the debate, has predicted Trump will win the 90-minute debate, telling Piers Morgan this week that the ex-president could in fact “win a prize for the greatest debater in modern American history, probably since Lincoln-Douglas”.Many of Kennedy’s supporters come from among the “double-haters” – polls show that about one in four voters don’t like either Biden or Trump – including a growing percentage of US adults who identify as independents, from both sides of the political spectrum, and from what has been described as “wellness world elites” attracted to conspiracy-minded views on health and medicine, and environmentalists.Christy Jones, 54, a holistic health and mindfulness coach from Glendora, California, told the Associated Press that she worries people won’t know Kennedy is running if he’s not on the debate stage. “He could still win if people choose to be courageous,” she said. “If all the people that actually want change voted for him he would be in. People are asking for change.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSujat Desai, a 20-year-old student from California, told the AP that Kennedy’s absence from the debate is a major hurdle for him to overcome. “I think it’s a pretty lethal blow not to be in this debate, and it would be detrimental not to be in the next.”On Thursday, TV doctor Dr Phil released a preview of an interview with Kennedy also scheduled to be broadcast tonight in which Kennedy said he’d invited Biden to co-fund a poll in October “and whoever is least likely to beat Donald Trump will withdraw”.But this surge of debate-surrounding publicity may only serve to obscure another reality that Kennedy, after months of campaigning and fundraising, is approaching a lull in events, and he lacks money for a television commercials while he fights for ballot access.A Kennedy campaign spokesperson said the candidate “has a full schedule for July with many public events, mostly on the east coast and including one big rally” that would be announced next week. More
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Robert F Kennedy Jr doesn’t meet requirements to take part in CNN debate
by Evelyn Reynolds 20 June 2024, 13:58
Robert F Kennedy Jr, who is running as an independent presidential candidate, will not be included in CNN’s debate next week after failing to meet the network’s criteria.A Wednesday midnight deadline passed without Kennedy being able to demonstrate that he had met the conditions necessary to share the debate platform with Joe Biden and Donald Trump.CNN has stipulated that participants need to have secured ballot access in enough states to capture the 270 electoral college votes necessary to win the presidency, while recording 15% support in at least four national polls.Kennedy, an environmental lawyer who has gained a reputation for engaging in anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, has been confirmed on the ballot in only five states – Utah, Delaware, Oklahoma, Michigan and Tennessee – according to the Washington Post.Additionally, CNN credited him with being on the ballot in California and Hawaii, where he is the presumptive nominee for several smaller parties where the states have yet to certify him. In total, the states account for 100 electoral votes.As of Wednesday, Kennedy had reached the 15% polling threshold in just three national surveys.Kennedy’s campaign has threatened to sue CNN if it does not include him in the 27 June debate. The campaign has claimed that he is on the ballot for nine states and has collected enough signatures to be given ballot access in 14 more.Kennedy has also filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission arguing that his exclusion is unfair.Analysts have speculated that his competing as a third-party candidate could have a potentially significant effect on the outcome of November’s election, with polls showing Biden and Trump running neck-and-neck, both nationally and in several battleground states.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHowever, it is unclear which of the two main candidates’ prospects are more harmed by his presence. He initially attempted to run as a Democrat before withdrawing to stand independently.While his public profile from sharing the name of America’s most illustrious political families could attract many Democrats, his anti-Covid vaccine views have appeared popular among right-leaning voters who would normally favour Trump. More
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Muted mics, no props: CNN details rules for Biden and Trump debate
by Evelyn Reynolds 16 June 2024, 15:42
The first US presidential debate between incumbent Joe Biden and Republican rival Donald Trump on 27 June will include two commercial breaks, no props and muted microphones except when recognized to speak, CNN said Saturday.The rules, agreed outside the Commission on Presidential Debates, are designed to reduce fractious interruptions and cross-talk that have often marred TV encounters in recent presidential election cycles.CNN, a division of Warner Bros Discovery, said debate moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash “will use all tools at their disposal to enforce timing and ensure a civilized discussion” during the 90-minute broadcast from Atlanta.Another Biden-Trump face-off will be hosted by ABC anchors David Muir and Linsey Davis in September. The traditional October debate will not take place as part of the agreement between the two campaigns and television networks that cut out the commission following years of complaints and perceived slights.CNN said both candidates will appear at a uniform podium during the 90-minute debate, podium positions will be determined by a coin flip and candidates will be given a pen, a pad of paper and a bottle of water but cannot use props.“Microphones will be muted throughout the debate except for the candidate whose turn it is to speak,” CNN said.The network also said that during the two commercial breaks, campaign staff will not be permitted to interact with their candidate, and unlike previous debates there will be no studio audience.Biden and Trump, the two oldest candidates ever to run for US president, will be seeking the support of an uncommonly large swathe of undecided voters who may only begin to pay close attention to the contest closer to the 5 November election day.But with polls already narrowing in crucial swing states, the debates come with risks for both candidates with markedly different styles of governance – on a seasoned senator who relies on an extensive staff for policy positions, and a New York developer-turned-reality TV star who shoots from the hip.According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll earlier this month, Biden is losing support among voters without college degrees, a large group that includes Black people, Hispanic women, young voters and suburban women.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe essence of the argument – Biden accuses his predecessor of being unhinged and a danger to democracy, while Trump accuses Biden of being senile and corrupt – has so far left many voters cool to the prospect of a 2024 rematch between two political candidates who, at 81 and 78, are twice the US median age.According to a campaign memo viewed by Reuters, Biden has three preferred debate topics: abortion rights, the state of democracy and the economy. Trump’s team has indicated that immigration, public safety and inflation are his key issues.The hosting networks will be keen to ensure that the twin debates will run more smoothly than in 2020, when the discussion focused on Trump’s pandemic response and moderator Chris Wallace had to step in to remind the candidates he was asking the questions.The second scheduled debate set for October did not take place due to Trump’s Covid-19 diagnosis and his refusal to appear remotely rather than in person. In this election cycle, both candidates have refused to refused to debate rivals for their party’s nomination.CNN said that candidates eligible to participate must appear on a sufficient number of state ballots to reach the 270 electoral vote threshold needed to win and receive at least 15% in four separate national polls.It said it was “not impossible” that independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr, could still qualify, saying he has received at least 15% in three qualifying polls to date and has qualified for the ballot in six states, making him eligible for 89 electoral college votes.The Kennedy campaign said Saturday that its polling showed he was now in second place alongside Biden in Utah, but behind Trump, and that he outpaces Biden and Trump among independents nationally.Reuters contributed to this story More
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Could RFK swing enough votes from Trump and Biden to decide the election?
by Evelyn Reynolds 9 June 2024, 13:00
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View image in fullscreenThe Kennedy name looms large over American politics. John F Kennedy, despite serving only twoand a half years as president before his assassination, is frequently ranked among the top 10 US leaders; his brother, Robert F Kennedy, seemed set for his own spell in the White House until he too was killed in 1968.Enter: Robert F Kennedy Jr, nephew of the former, son of the latter and increasingly, persona non grata of the surviving Kennedy clan.Part-time environmental lawyer, full-time conspiracy theorist, an animal enthusiast who owned a pet lion at his elite boarding school and who, in his telling, had part of his brain eaten by a worm, Kennedy entered the 2024 presidential race as a Democrat running against Biden, before switching to an independent in October last year. The 70-year-old, who also has a history of associating with white supremacists, is an unknown quantity in the 2024 election race, with both parties worried about the havoc he could wreak.Five months out from perhaps the most consequential election in recent US history, Biden and Trump continue to be unpopular with the American public. Kennedy’s ability to be neither of those men, and his willingness to lean into his family name, have positioned him as a spanner in the works of American democracy.Both Democrats and Republicans fear that Kennedy, who is polling at about 10% nationally, could pull votes away from their men. Even a few Biden or Trump voters hopping on to the Kennedy train could be enough to influence what is expected to be a tight race. In an indication of the threat he poses, Trump has gone from praising Kennedy as a “very smart person” a year ago to recently posting a four-minute video attacking him on Truth Social.Plenty of people try to be president. In 2020 alone, 1,212 people filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission saying they were running for the White House. Yet it is Kennedy who is drawing all the coverage.Would he be getting as much attention – and pulling in millions of dollars in donations, some of it from former Trump supporters – if he had a different last name? Probably not.The world was introduced to RFK Jr early. His father, a supporter of Israel, was killed by Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, a Palestinian-Jordanian man, as Kennedy Sr campaigned for president in Los Angeles. A 14-year-old Kennedy Jr was a pallbearer at his funeral: black and white photos from the funeral show a shaggy-haired Kennedy at the head of the coffin, looking numb and out of place among a crowd of grown men.Kennedy was the third of 11 children (the Kennedys were prodigious breeders), born to his father and Ethel Kennedy – a Chicago-born daughter of a coal magnate who remained a public presence way into the 1990s. Ethel made an appearance on the sitcom Cheers and was even named a tough tennis opponent in a Seinfeld episode.If Kennedy benefited from the family name, he benefited from the family wealth, too. Kennedy was raised in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, at the Kennedy compound – where his mother lives to this day.He studied at Millbrook school, a private boarding school in New York. At Millbrook, Kennedy was not universally liked, Jerry Oppenheimer wrote in a biography of the future presidential candidate.“[Kennedy] was viewed by some fellow students as egotistical and irresponsible for strutting around the campus and on the sidelines at home football games with a potentially dangerous young lion on a leash,” Oppenheimer wrote.Millbrook’s headmaster eventually banished the lion, who was called Toto, from campus, and the then 130lb big cat went to live at a safari park in Florida.Other interests, Oppenheimer reported, included “getting stoned” and, oddly, falconry. Kennedy was in a gang too: the Hyannis Port Terrors, who apparently “ran around and stole alcohol” during the summer months.(Kennedy’s parading around with a lion had apparently been forgiven by 1998: that year, he was the commencement speaker at the school.)His teenage years were difficult. In an interview in 2023, Kennedy said he started taking heroin when he was 15 years old, saying he “had a big empty hole inside”, and in 1983, when he was 29, Kennedy was charged with heroin possession after he “became ill”, the New York Times reported, “in the washroom of an airliner” which stopped in Rapid City, South Dakota.“All of a sudden everybody knew I was a drug addict and it gave me the freedom to get help,” Kennedy told an interviewer. “I could just be who I was and be honest.”Kennedy had hidden his addiction while graduating from Harvard University and earning a law degree from Pace University in New York, and after he had completed two years’ probation as a result of the heroin charge, he embarked on a career in environmental law.He worked for Riverkeeper, an organization which protects New York’s Hudson River, and sued polluters in an effort to protect waterways; his work earned him a place on the front cover of New York Magazine in 1995, which described him as “The Kennedy who matters”.But Kennedy – who during his campaign has criticized Biden for overspending on environmental issues – would become better known in the US as a conspiracy theorist.Kennedy spent years claiming, loudly and wrongly, that vaccines cause autism, while in 2023 alone Kennedy stated that wifi causes “leaky brain”, linked antidepressants to school shootings and said that chemicals in water were making children transgender.His history of embracing conspiracy theories meant Covid-19 was a perfect storm for Kennedy. His already-existing anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense became “an influential force that spreads false and misleading information”, Associated Press reported, with the group publishing books that falsely claim the Covid-19 vaccine caused a spike in deaths. A report in the Journal of Medical Internet Research in 2022 named Kennedy’s Twitter account as “the top superspreader” of misinformation about Covid-19.Kennedy was particularly criticized for a speech he gave at a rally against mandatory Covid vaccines in Washington in January 2022. Standing at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Kennedy told an animated crowd that unnamed figures were trying to control the American population in a way never seen before.“Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland, you could hide in the attic like Anne Frank did,” Kennedy said.“Today the mechanisms are being put in place that will make it so none of us can run, none of us can hide.”The remarks caused uproar, not least from the Auschwitz museum, which tweeted: “Exploiting of the tragedy of people who suffered, were humiliated, tortured & murdered by the totalitarian regime of Nazi Germany – including children like Anne Frank – in a debate about vaccines & limitations during global pandemic is a sad symptom of moral & intellectual decay.”Kennedy later apologized for saying that people who wished to remain unvaccinated had fewer freedoms than Anne Frank. But he continued to dabble in Covid-19 misinformation, writing in a 2021 book that Anthony Fauci, the top US public health expert during the pandemic, had conspired with Bill Gates to suppress alternative medicine treatments for Covid-19.View image in fullscreenGiven his history, Kennedy’s declaration, as he announced his run for the Democratic presidential nomination in April 2023, that he was “not an ideal presidential candidate for normal times”, could seem like an understatement. But people barely had a chance to get to grips with his candidacy before, in October, he scrapped the idea of running as a Democrat, and announced an independent campaign, this time claiming that the “two-party establishment” was “leading us all over a cliff”.As an independent choice, Kennedy represents a still quite old, but not as old as Biden or Trump, candidate. He would be 71 by the time he took office, but Kennedy presents as younger than his two rivals: less jowly, more robust and with a more convincing head of hair. At a campaign stop in June 2023, he stripped to the waist to lift some weights at a gym in Los Angeles, revealing a fairly impressive physique.On the campaign trial, Kennedy looks the part: that thick silver hair, those big white teeth, that perma-tan. His voice, then, comes as a surprise. Kennedy has a strained, halting tone, owing to spasmodic dysphonia, a neurological condition which affects his voice.That condition is far from Kennedy’s only brush with ill health. Earlier this year, the New York Times reported on a deposition Kennedy had given during his divorce from his second wife, Mary Kathleen Richardson Kennedy. In the deposition, given in 2012, Kennedy said he had experienced memory loss, which “was caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died”.“I have cognitive problems, clearly,” Kennedy said. “I have short-term memory loss, and I have longer-term memory loss that affects me.”After the Times article was published, Kennedy tweeted that he was willing “to eat 5 more brain worms and still beat President Trump and President Biden in a debate”.Richardson Kennedy died by suicide in 2012, leaving behind her four children with Kennedy. Before Richardson Kennedy, Kennedy had two children with his first wife, Emily Black, one of whom is called Robert F Kennedy III. In 2014, Kennedy married Cheryl Hines, an actor best known for playing Larry David’s wife in Curb Your Enthusiasm. The pair live in Los Angeles.Hines, 58, has sought to distance herself from her husband’s campaign. She said in an interview with Fox News earlier this year that she did not always agree with Kennedy’s politics: “We’ve learned to talk through it. Talk it out. Listen to each other. Sometimes, agree to disagree or say: ‘Oh, I’m going to think about that and I hear what you’re saying,’ or: ‘I don’t like the way you’re saying it. I wish you’d say it in a different way.’”The fear for Biden and Trump is that Kennedy could be a Ralph Nader figure. Nader ran as the Green party candidate in the 2000 presidential election, and some Democrats still believe that it was his performance in Florida that swung the election away from Al Gore and towards George W Bush.Early predictions suggested Kennedy – as a scion of the most famous Democratic family in history – would draw support from Biden. Trump and other Republicans certainly seemed to think so, and spent months extolling his virtues – there was even suggestions among rightwing media that Kennedy could be a good vice-president to Trump.But conservatives might come to regret pumping him up. Polls have shown that Trump supporters are more drawn to Kennedy – with his vaccine skepticism and hardline policies on the border particularly popular – than Biden.Republican donors have flocked to Kennedy, too. Timothy Mellon, a Wyoming-based billionaire who has previously donated to groups supporting Trump, has given $25m to the Kennedy campaign, while Rolling Stone reported that other donors include regular Republican donors like John Schnatter, the disgraced former CEO of Papa John’s Pizza, and a financier who briefly supported Ron DeSantis’s bid for the Republican nomination.The support is enough for Kennedy to potentially make a nuisance of himself in terms of pulling votes away from Biden or Trump. But that doesn’t mean Kennedy is popular.Like Biden and Trump, more people dislike Kennedy than like him. According to FiveThirtyEight, 42% of Americans have an unfavorable opinion of Kennedy, with just 35% seeing him favorably: a favorability rating of -7%. (Trump has a favorability of -12%, Biden -16%.)He’s a bit less unpopular than his two main opponents, then, which can only be a good thing. But Kennedy has already shown himself to be a problematic figure on the campaign trail.Last July, he caused controversy when a video recording showed him falsely claiming that the Covid-19 virus had been “ethnically targeted” at Caucasians and Black people, while Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people had greater immunity.Members of the Kennedy family roundly criticized the candidate after his remarks were made public: Jack Schlossberg, a grandson of President Kennedy, called his cousin’s campaign “an embarrassment” in a video.Other family members have made it clear that they oppose their namesake’s candidacy. In April, more than a dozen members of the Kennedy family, including six of Kennedy’s siblings, endorsed Biden for president.That should be galling for Kennedy, who on the campaign trail repeatedly mentions his family history. His Kennedy 2024 website frequently references his uncle, who despite his short term ranked as the ninth best president in a 2022 Siena College poll of historians, and 10th in a similar survey of 154 historians and presidential experts this year. (Biden was placed 14th, Trump came last.)Kennedy’s uncle president may even have influenced his decision to run as an independent. In a speech in Maryland in 1958, when he was still a senator and was two years away from becoming the 35th president of the US, John F Kennedy said:“Let us not despair but act. Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past: let us accept our own responsibility for the future.”Kennedy is hoping that Americans will agree with that quote – or at least the bit about not seeking Republican or Democratic answers – come November. More
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Robert F Kennedy Jr files election complaint over CNN debate rules
by Evelyn Reynolds 29 May 2024, 18:48
The independent presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr filed an election complaint on Wednesday alleging CNN is colluding with Joe Biden and the presumptive Republican nominee, Donald Trump, to exclude him from a debate the network is hosting next month.Kennedy alleges the requirements to participate in the 27 June debate were designed to ensure only Biden and Trump would qualify and Kennedy claims he is being held to a higher standard.“CNN is making prohibited corporate contributions to both campaigns and the Biden committee and the Trump committee have accepted these prohibited corporate contributions,” a lawyer for Kennedy, Lorenzo Holloway, wrote in a letter to the Federal Election Commission.CNN said the complaint was without merit.Biden and Trump agreed this month to the CNN debate and a second on 10 September hosted by ABC, bypassing the non-partisan commission that has organized debates for nearly four decades. The first debate will come before Biden and Trump have been formally nominated by their parties this summer.Kennedy has looked to the debates as a singular opportunity to stand alongside Biden and Trump, lending legitimacy to his long-shot bid, and to convince people inclined to support him that he has a shot at winning. Both the Biden and Trump campaigns fear he could play spoiler.Kennedy still has time to meet the requirements, though the window is narrowing.CNN has said candidates will be invited if they have secured a place on the ballot in states totaling at least 270 votes in the electoral college, the minimum needed to win the presidency, and have reached 15% in four reliable polls by 20 June.Kennedy’s campaign says he has submitted signatures or other paperwork to appear on the ballot in nine states – California, Delaware, Hawaii, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma, Texas and Utah – with a combined 171 electoral votes, though not all have affirmed his name will be listed. California, the largest prize on the electoral map with 54 votes, will not certify any candidates until 29 August.“The law in virtually every state provides that the nominee of a state-recognized political party will be allowed ballot access without petitioning,” a CNN spokesperson said in a statement on Wednesday. “As the presumptive nominees of their parties both Biden and Trump will satisfy this requirement. As an independent candidate, under applicable laws RFK Jr does not. The mere application for ballot access does not guarantee that he will appear on the ballot in any state.”Kennedy also has not met the polling criteria, the statement said.Biden and Trump have easily cleared the polling threshold but will not be certified for the ballot until their parties formally nominate them. Both have secured enough delegates to lock in their nominations. More

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