I first caught this on Huffington Post, then I went straight to the source on Mediaite. Fourteen staffers of RFK Jr.’s campaign have resigned in January, and this is amid accusations over lavish spending, incompetency, and grifting by the main players in the campaign. Consultants are being paid tens of thousands of dollars a month, and the candidate made his daughter-in-law campaign manager, who turned around and made her nanny chief of staff.
It gets a lot worse.
Fourteen members of Kennedy24 have resigned since the start of the year, including 12 field staff and two main staff, according to multiple sources who spoke with Mediaite on the condition of anonymity. One source close to the campaign pinned the turmoil on two leaders: Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, campaign manager and Kennedy’s daughter-in-law, and Del Bigtree, an anti-vaccine activist who serves as the campaign’s communications director.
According to the report, Bigtree’s consulting firm was paid $35,000 in December. There are also other consulting compainies who are making tens of thousands of dollars off of this so called campaign. All the consulting companies have direct links to those who have senior positions in the campaign.
And Bigtree has a history of making lots of money lying about vaccines.
Additionally, other staffers who quit were frustrated with the fact that they couldn’t get reimbursement for gasoline purchases or had to pay for their own supplies. Meanwhile, Bigtree is giving ZOOM calls from the ski slopes and has been heard saying that this is all like traveling with a rock band.
And as for Fox Kennedy, here is her pick for chief of staff:
Fox Kennedy, meanwhile, “hired her nanny” Brigid Rasmussen as chief of staff, which was seen internally as a sign of incompetence for the director of a presidential campaign.
A second campaign worker also griped about the hiring of Fox Kennedy’s nanny as the campaign’s chief of staff. “Although Brigid is a nice young woman, she has no idea how to operate in her role and is inexperienced. This is merely one red flag that indicates incompetence,” they said.
Others have pointed out that there are not enough real staff offices to actually be a campaign. This has lead to the charges from those who took RFK Jr. seriously that this is a huge grift and scam. And why should they be surprised? Most of the funding for this grift is from Trump donors, and it is not from some old people sending small donations. Timothy Mellon, of the Mellon banking family, provided $5 million to RFK Jr.
The real fear about RFK Jr. is that he will be a spoiler in this year’s election. He won’t have a real campaign organization to mobilize voters. Instead, rich fuckers like Mellon will keep writing big checks for TV, radio, and social media ads. However, Democrats can help neutralize any voter appeal for RFK Jr. by just hammering the fact 1) he’s an anti-vaccine loon and 2) HE’S A GRIFTER!
Republican voters love grifters, but most independents and Democrats don’t like grifters.