Robert F Kennedy Jr’s campaign bankrolled by Republican mega-donor
A Super Pac affiliated with Robert F Kennedy Jr, the anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist running for president as a Democrat, owes half its cash to a longtime Republican mega-donor and Trump backer, according to campaign finance reports filed on Monday.
The group, American Values 2024, reported receiving $5m from Timothy Mellon, a wealthy businessman from Wyoming, according to NBC News and Politico. It registered with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) in April, days before Kennedy officially launched his campaign, according to FEC records.
Mellon, 81, is the grandson of Andrew Mellon, a former US treasury secretary who made his fortune in banking. The Texas Tribune reported that Mellon, a top donor to Donald Trump’s 2020 re-election effort, supported controversial immigration laws and was responsible for 98% of the contributions to the Texas governor Greg Abbott’s fund to build a border wall. Mellon, who twice gave $10m to the Trump-aligned America First Action Super Pac in 2020, also used racist stereotypes to describe Black people in an autobiography he self-published in 2015.
“The fact that Kennedy gets so much bipartisan support tells me two things: that he’s the one candidate who can unite the country and root out corruption and that he’s the one Democrat who can win in the general election,” Mellon said in a press release by the Super Pac circulated ahead of the reporting deadline.
Kennedy’s campaign attracted a considerable amount of support from Republican donors in the weeks since he announced his run in April. A political watchdog found that Kennedy has a “long history” of antisemitism, racism and xenophobia.
The Super Pac, which described federal policies aimed at containing Covid-19 as “draconian”, received nearly all of the rest of its funding from another billionaire donor, Gavin de Becker, an author and security specialist associated with Jeff Bezos. De Becker has given to both Republican and Democratic candidates, according to FEC records, more recently including Ron Johnson, a Republican senator of Wisconsin, and businessman and the failed 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang.
Together, Mellon and De Becker account for about 97% of total donations to the Super Pac.
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Kennedy is the son of former US attorney general and Senator Robert F Kennedy, who was assassinated on the campaign trail for the Democratic nomination. He is the nephew of former US president John F Kennedy, who was assassinated in office.
Source: The Guardian US
