Norms Impact
RFK Jr. Went ‘Dinosaur Bone Hunting’ with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell
DOJ disclosures now place a sitting HHS secretary inside Epstein-Maxwell travel and leisure networks, testing our basic expectation that senior officials avoid compromising associations.
Sources
Summary
The Department of Justice released files that include a 2012 email exchange indicating Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell went fossil hunting with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The disclosure places a sitting cabinet secretary’s personal associations inside the federal government’s public record of a major sex-trafficking investigation. The practical consequence is renewed scrutiny of access, judgment, and disclosure expectations for senior officials whose private networks intersect with criminal enterprises.
Reality Check
This conduct threatens democratic stability by normalizing elite proximity to a documented sex-trafficking network while leaving the public to guess what access and influence that proximity may have purchased. On the facts provided—emails and acknowledged flights—there is no showing of a crime by Kennedy, and nothing here establishes liability under federal sex-trafficking statutes such as 18 U.S.C. §§ 1591 and 2422. The institutional failure is not criminality but judgment and governance: when cabinet-level officials have personal histories with figures later central to major federal prosecutions, our safeguards against captured decision-making depend on candid disclosure and strict conflict-of-interest discipline.
Media
Detail
<p>On Friday, Jan. 30, the Department of Justice released an additional batch of files from the criminal investigations into Jeffrey Epstein. Within the release, an August 2012 email from Epstein to Ghislaine Maxwell referenced “dinosaur and fossil hunting” with paleontologist Jack Horner “on the ranch,” describing fossils found. The following day, Maxwell replied asking whether they had gone fossil hunting “with him and Bobby Kennedy in N Dakota,” to which Epstein responded, “Yes.”</p><p>Maxwell separately confirmed a trip in an interview with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche that was released by the DOJ last year and obtained by Politico, stating they “went dinosaur bone hunting in the Dakotas,” while saying she did not recall flying anywhere with Kennedy. The context also includes flight records showing Kennedy, Mary Richardson Kennedy, and two children traveling with Epstein from Teterboro Airport to Palm Beach in 1994, and Kennedy’s 2023–2024 interviews acknowledging two flights on Epstein’s jet, including one to Rapid City, South Dakota, for fossil hunting.</p>