So today I received—at 7:53 AM on Election Day—the records I have been demanding from the State of New York since August. See, e.g., “RFK Jr. Expected to End Campaign After Questions Raised About Falconry License” (Aug. 22, 2024); and see “RFK Jr. Gets Nowhere With Residency Appeal” (Oct. 24, 2024) (with links to other posts on this important topic). In the interest of time and so you may consider this when voting, I will just provide the records below with a minimum of commentary.
Three points:
(1) The records show that Kennedy does have a New York falconry license, effective on July 16, 2020, and expiring at the end of this year.
(2) But he changed his address on July 10, 2023—three months after he declared he was running for president—from an address in White Plains to the Katonah, New York, address he later used on his nominating petition. (The Department has, in an act of utter pointlessness, redacted the street addresses themselves even though they are public information as a result of Kennedy’s own court filings.) We now know, of course, that Kennedy was a California resident the entire time and never lived at the Katonah address for even one day, although he cited these same records to support his claim that New York was his “place of residence” all along. So this evidence suggests that making false statements on falconry records (which, as the form notes, is a crime) to support his bogus residency claim was in the works much earlier than previously known. This right here is journalism, people!
(3) The agency did not produce a single example of the falconry reports that New York falconers are required to file every year. It did produce a letter it sent Kennedy in March 2022 reminding him that he had not filed his report for 2021 (the first full year of his license period), but produced no evidence that he ever filed that report or any others during the relevant time.
I remind you that although Kennedy ended his campaign some time ago, he has since endorsed Trump, and one of Trump’s more terrifying statements is that he might put Kennedy in charge of something, like public health. Probably anyone willing to contemplate that apocalyptic idea is not going to be persuaded otherwise by Falcongate, but you never know. Maybe this will, finally, be the last straw for someone? It is my duty to try to make this possible.