A super PAC backing Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. raised over $9 million in the first half of this year, with the lion’s share coming from a Republican megadonor.
The American Values 2024 super PAC raised $9.8 million by the end of June, according to a financial disclosure filed with the Federal Election Commission. More than half of the money — $5 million — was donated by Republican moneyman Timothy Mellon.
American Values 2024 touted the bipartisan financial support in a release last week, saying Mr. Kennedy was the “Democratic candidate best positioned to take votes away from Donald Trump and to win in November.”
Mr. Kennedy, who was known for being an anti-vaccine crusader long before the COVID-19 pandemic, has mounted a surprisingly strong long-shot challenge to President Biden. He scored an average of 13% of the Democratic primary vote in recent national polls tracked by Real Clear Politics.
Mr. Mellon previously donated millions to political campaigns for former President Donald Trump and other Republicans in the 2020 election cycle.
“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,” Mr. Mellon said in a statement to American Values 2024.
So far, the Super PAC has raised a total of $16.8 million for Mr. Kennedy — the organization announced that it had received $6.47 million in July.
Mr. Mellon was not the only donor to drop millions on Mr. Kennedy’s candidacy. Gavin de Becker, an author and longtime security consultant for Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, contributed $4.5 million to the PAC.
“We Democrats sorely need a candidate people can be enthusiastic about, someone brave enough to tell the truth and someone who understands our regulatory agencies because he has litigated against their corruption for years,” Mr. de Becker said.
Mr. Kennedy recently testified before the House Judiciary Committee about censorship on social media platforms. Democrats attempted to stop Mr. Kennedy’s testimony because they said he pushed conspiracy theories.
Mr. Kennedy has said that COVID-19 vaccines were not rigorously tested. At a dinner event the week of the hearing, Mr. Kennedy said that COVID-19 was a targeted attack on “Caucasians and Black people,” and that the people most immune from the virus were the “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
Mr. Kennedy’s testimony could have spurred the uptick in donations in July.
“We saw $5 [million] in donations come in DURING the congressional testimony by RFK, Jr,” said American Values 2024 co-founder Tony Lyons. “We will see that same kind of reaction from donors each time the DNC and the Biden administration undertake dirty tricks against this presidential candidate.”
• Alex Miller can be reached at amiller@washigtontimes.com.