Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a Democratic candidate for president, stood at the world’s largest bitcoin conference in Miami in May and said many, “I am not an investor and I am not here to give investment advice.” He then announced that he would accept campaign donations in bitcoin.
What Kennedy didn’t tell the crowd was that his family had recently invested in bitcoin, according to a financial disclosure form he filed on June 30. On page twelfth of the report, Kennedy listed a brokerage account holding between $100,001 and $250,000 worth of bitcoin. Hours after this story was published, Kennedy’s campaign manager, former Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich, on CNBC that the bitcoin purchase was made after the speech in Miami and before the June 30 filing deadline.
The situation could represent a conflict of interest if Kennedy is touting bitcoin on the campaign trail while his immediate family holds the cryptocurrency, according to Virginia Canter, the chief ethics counsel for the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. .
“There is no conflict here,” Kucinich told CNBC in a follow-up interview.
Since the conference, Kennedy has continued to tout bitcoin.
In late June, he tweeted: “Bitcoin is not only a bulwark against totalitarianism and the manipulation of our money supply, it points the way to a future where government institutions are more transparent and more democratic.” The tweet includes a video of his speech in Miami where he describes how he would be pro-bitcoin as president.
The filing says the bitcoin holding earned less than $201 but does not say when it was bought. The filing also did not say who bought it or how much the family may have spent on their original investment. It also doesn’t say if they sold their bitcoin holding.
The bitcoin holding is listed under a section on the form with the assets that may also belong to spouses and dependent children. It is intended to reflect holdings from the “prior calendar year and current year through the filing date,” according to the Office of Government Ethics. Kennedy is married to “Curb Your Enthusiasm” star Cheryl Hines and has six children. Kennedy signed and filed the disclosure form with the Office of Government Ethics late last month, according to the document.
After CNBC made multiple attempts to get comment, the Kennedy campaign said hours after the publication of this story that “the investments are not his, but his wife’s. He is not involved in his investment decisions .” The campaign did not say how long Hines held the bitcoin investment or when he bought the asset.
Later Friday, however, a representative of the campaign sent a new statement, saying that the bitcoin investment was in fact Kennedy’s. “I made a mistake in my last communication. Mr. Kennedy had bitcoin investment holdings, but this came later. At the time of the bitcoin speech he had no cryptocurrency holdings,” the representative said.
Before the Kennedy campaign commented, CREW’s Canter said ownership was definitely current as of June 30, when he filed his disclosure. “Under a traditional conflict of interest analysis, Hines’ financial interests are attributed to him,” Canter said.
“I’m really concerned that he’s speaking at this conference, announcing this investment to potential voters while the family has a history of owning bitcoin. It looks like he could do the same thing for Procter and Gamble, ” he added. “There is no difference in my mind from the point of view of conflicts.”
After Kennedy’s May appearance at the Miami conference, CNBC asked if Kennedy had any crypto holdings. “Mr. Kennedy has no crypto holdings,” a spokesperson for the campaign said at the time.
Kennedy told the conference that if he were to become president he would “make sure that your right to hold and use bitcoin is inviolable.”
President Joe Biden’s administration has waged an aggressive fight regarding cryptocurrencies. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler told CNBC in June that “we don’t need more digital money” after the SEC sued crypto exchange Coinbase for allegedly acting as an unregistered broker and exchange.
The price of Bitcoin has seen an uptick recently, hitting a 13-month high on Thursday, despite parts of the crypto industry seeing headwinds.
Kennedy’s campaign has drawn attention from some wealthy backers, though he remains far behind Biden in Democratic primary polls. A Quinnipiac survey from June shows Biden with 70% support among Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters, while Kennedy gets 17%. Kennedy, 69, is the son of former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and the nephew of former President John F. Kennedy, both of whom were assassinated in the 1960s.
Kennedy’s pro-bitcoin stance has aligned him with several leading tech investors, such as billionaire and bitcoin enthusiast Jack Dorsey, with some of them offering support for his presidential run. Others include David Sacks, Chamath Palihapitiya and Omeed Malik.
Kennedy, who has been criticized for spreading misinformation about vaccines in general, has a history of boosting bitcoin. His nonprofit, Children’s Health Defense, also has an interest in cryptocurrencies.
Their taxes in 2021 records shows under the “investments” section that the group has crypto worth more than $78,000. A CHD spokesman, who news played a key role in pushing back against Covid vaccines and helping to raise Kennedy’s profile before he ran for president, having previously told CNBC that the cryptocurrencies listed were not “investments” but, in fact, “donations.” CHD’s website shows that bitcoin is one of the accepted cryptocurrencies to donate to the nonprofit group.
In April, before he began running for president, Kennedy tweeted what appeared to be an endorsement of bitcoin as a tool to cushion the effects from a struggling US economy.
“Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin give the public an escape route from the splatter zone when this bubble always bursts,” Kennedy said.
In May, days before he went up to the Miami bitcoin conference, Kennedy tweeted: “Cryptocurrencies, led by bitcoin, along with other crypto technologies are a major engine of innovation. It would be a mistake for the US government to hobble the industry and drive innovation elsewhere.”
A day later he tweeted: “Bitcoin has been a lifesaver for people movements around the world.”
