FDA Staffers Dish on Unhinged Meeting With RFK Jr.: ‘The Deep State is Real’

AP Photo/Matt Slocum

A meeting with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at the Food and Drug Administration was intended to be an introduction between Kennedy and the agency staffers he oversees, but his remarks were so shocking that several people walked out, according to a report by Politico on Friday.

President Donald Trump’s decision to nominate the namesake of Robert F. Kennedy to lead HHS was loudly criticized because of Kennedy’s long history of controversial comments and anti-vaccine activism. Kennedy insisted to Senators weighing his confirmation that he was not anti-vaccine, but his critics pointed to years and years of him saying things like “there’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.” Nonetheless, he squeaked by in a 52-48 vote mostly along party lines.

Since his confirmation, Kennedy has been facing mounting criticism amid a measles outbreak that has killed two unvaccinated children and hospitalized dozens more, his announcement that he had tapped a proponent of a discredited theory to “prove” what causes autism, and his support for sweeping budget cuts and layoffs of thousands of employees throughout the agencies under his purview.

According to Politico, Kennedy delivered “largely off-the-cuff remarks” in a 40-minute meeting with FDA staffers Friday. Two employees who attended the meeting spoke anonymously to the reporters, who were provided with a transcript and audio of Kennedy’s comments.

“President Trump always talks about the Deep State, and the media, you know, disparages him and says that he’s paranoid,” Kennedy said. “But the Deep State is real. And it’s not, you know, just George Soros and Bill Gates and a bunch of nefarious individuals sitting together in a room and plotting the, you know, the destruction of humanity.”

He also repeated his claims that Americans were healthier when he was a child than they are now and touting the Kennedy family’s long history with the Special Olympics and other charities. A previous version of the Politico story inaccurately reported that he had used the word “retarded” in a derogatory way, but corrected to reflect what he really said:

Over the course of 40 minutes, Kennedy, in largely off-the-cuff remarks, asserted that the “Deep State” is real, referenced past CIA experiments on human mind control and accused the employees he was speaking to of becoming a “sock puppet” of the industries they regulate.

“Because of my family’s commitment to these issues, I spent 200 hours at Wassaic Home for the Retarded when I was in high school,” Kennedy said, in a reference to the Wassaic State School for the Mentally Retarded in Wassaic, New York. “So I was seeing people with intellectual disabilities all the time. I never saw anybody with autism.”

The remark jolted several FDA employees in the audience, who misheard the reference and thought he was making a derogatory remark about people with intellectual disabilities, according to two employees granted anonymity for fear of retaliation.

Kennedy also accused FDA staffers of being swayed by “agency capture” and acting as a “sock puppet” for the industries subject to their regulatory oversight. He referenced human mind control experiments like the CIA’s Project MKUltra and the Milgram experiment, which tested participants’ willingness to inflict what they were told were painful, possibly fatal, electric shocks to others if an authority figure ordered them to do so — as part of a discussion that Politico described as “an apparent effort to encourage FDA employees to stay true to their mission of making Americans healthier.”

These comments from the boss “alarmed and disheartened” FDA staffers and several of them walked out of the rooms where Kennedy’s speech was being aired, according to the sources who spoke to Politico.

Update: This story has been updated to reflect Politico’s correction regarding the claim Kennedy said “retarded” during his remarks. That correction read: “This article and headline have been updated to make clear that Kennedy was referring to the Wassaic State School for the Mentally Retarded where he worked in high school, not using a derogatory term for people with intellectual disabilities.”