NOAA confirms investigation into RFK Jr. over dead whale carcass – Boston News, Weather, Sports

(CNN) — The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NAO) confirmed on Monday that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is under investigation for allegedly beheading the carcass of a dead whale and transporting it back to his homeland two decades ago.

On Saturday, Kennedy said he received a letter from the National Marine Fisheries Service, an agency under NOAA, at a campaign rally in Arizona, informing him that he was under investigation for an incident he said occurred 20 years ago in which he collected a specimen of a dead whale.

A NOAA spokesman confirmed to CNN on Monday that Kennedy was under investigation for the incident.

“It has long been NOAA's practice not to comment on open investigations,” the spokesman said.

The story resurfaced shortly after Kennedy suspended his presidential campaign last month. A 2012 interview with Kennedy's daughter, Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy, published in Town & Country Magazine, was posted on social media. In the interview, Kennedy's daughter recalls her father cutting off the head of a dead whale carcass with a chainsaw on the beach near their family home on Cape Cod and bringing the whale's head back to New York.

After the story received widespread attention on social media, the Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund called on NOAA to investigate Kennedy over the incident, arguing that his actions could have jeopardized scientific research.

Kennedy said Saturday that he wrote a letter to NOAA after being informed that he was under investigation, accusing the group of killing marine animals with “massive offshore wind farms off the East Coast.”

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