Early reports that President-elect Donald Trump would pick longtime Overlawyered and personal favorite Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to head a panel on vaccine safety and scientific integrity — I am not making this up — appear to have been based on RFK, Jr.’s own account of his interaction with the President-elect, whose office promptly clarified that no such decision has been made. [Azeen Ghorayshi/BuzzFeed]
More: Seth Mnookin reviews the sad record on RFK and vaccines.
Orlando trial lawyer John Morgan, whose personal injury law firm bids for the distinction of the nation’s largest, has long been active in politics and policy (including the good libertarian cause of legalizing medical marijuana). So there isn’t much that’s newsy about his hosting an April 29 fundraiser for Hillary Clinton headlined by former President Bill Clinton. More noteworthy is that his law firm, per a March 31 announcement, is now welcoming to its practice as of counsel wayward scion Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the celebrity environmentalist and frothing hothead long associated with the Florida firm of Levin Papantonio. Along with Kennedy, of course, comes metric tons of baggage — on anti-vaccine scaremongering, on hyperbolic crusades against farms, on demands to put his ideological adversaries behind bars, as would-be EPA administrator, and so much more.
P.S. We have often referred to RFK for short in the past as America’s Most Irresponsible Public Figure®. Is it time to retire that nickname in light of the continued rise of other public figures who might justly contend for that title?
Video now out from Save Farm Families on the Hudson Farm case (earlier). Description:
Collateral Damage: Farm Families Under Attack reviews the questionable political and academic actions that enabled the New York-based Waterkeeper Alliance to push forward with its lawsuit against the Hudson family, and the continuing threat that environmental extremists pose to family farmers, not just in Maryland but across the nation.
I wrote about the case here, here, and here. It raises questions of legal ethics (when the mistaken factual basis for a claim is revealed, aren’t the attorneys obliged to withdraw it?), ideological adventurism in the environmental sphere by state-affiliated law schools, and the need for loser-pays. Maryland Attorney General Doug Gansler, who failed in a bid for the Democratic nomination for governor, comes off badly in the video, and America’s Most Irresponsible Public Figure® Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., even worse.
[cross-posted from my Maryland blog Free State Notes; more on RFK Jr.’s latest foray into public discussion, in which the celebrity scion/frothing hothead again demands the incarceration of various persons who take the opposite side from him in environmental controversy]
More coverage: Mark Newgent/Watchdog and Len Lazarick/Maryland Reporter.
The group Save Farm Families is doing a nonfiction film (link to trailer) about the Hudson Farm case, in which Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Waterkeeper group, backed by a University of Maryland environmental law clinic, sued an Eastern Shore chicken farming family on charges a judge later threw out as unfounded. More at my local policy blog Free State Notes.