Kennedy Katch and Kill Kontinued

Ryan Lizza has further elaborated on his accusations that Olivia Nuzzi was acting as an operative for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. while presenting herself to the public as a reporter:

The ex-fiancé of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s digital lover, Olivia Nuzzi, is now claiming she served as an undercover “political operative” for the Health and Human Services secretary throughout his failed presidential bid.

Nuzzi, 32, allegedly had a fling with Kennedy, 71, after interviewing him for New York magazine in 2023.

Ryan Lizza, a journalist formerly at Politico, wrote in a bombshell new Substack post on Wednesday that former fiancée Olivia Nuzzi learned Kennedy had dumped the body of a bear cub in New York City’s Central Park in 2014. 

Instead of reporting that information, a story that later became a hallmark of his botched campaign, Nuzzi then outed the source of the tip to Kennedy in a breach of basic journalistic ethics. Lizza claims Nuzzi helped Kennedy do damage control on the allegations before they were made public.

“Together they plotted ways to kill it, or, at the very least, get ahead of it,” Lizza, 51, wrote in his Substack piece titled “Catch and Kill.” The bear-dumping incident prompted a police investigation into animal cruelty. The case went unsolved until Kennedy confessed in a bizarre video shared on social media in August 2024, just days before a New Yorker article exposing the incident was published. 

“As she later revealed to me during hours of conversations, Olivia did this regularly throughout 2024: canvassing sources who trusted her, obtaining their opposition research on Bobby, and then feeding it directly to the candidate,” he added.

Lizza further claimed that Nuzzi was “secretly working to help make Bobby the next president,” and even helped negotiate the terms of his eventual endorsement of Donald Trump. This arrangement positioned Kennedy for a potential role in Trump’s Cabinet.

“The spring and summer of 2024 were busy for Olivia. Bobby was telling her he loved her and wanted to impregnate her, but he was also deeply confusing—he flipped back and forth between passionate engagement and total ghosting—and she was struggling to understand him,” wrote Lizza, who was fired by The New Yorker in 2017 following a sexual-misconduct allegation he has denied.

Lizza made several other explosive claims about Nuzzi’s alleged behind-the-scenes assistance to Kennedy. In one example, Lizza claims Nuzzi traded intel about the president with Kennedy after he realized his campaign was “over” and began negotiating an endorsement deal with Trump.

There’s yet more at the link. This mostly speaks for itself but:

• The reporter engaged in this grossly unethical conduct is AFICT still working with one of the country’s most prestigious media organizations (although it’s hard to see her surviving this), and was the subject of a horny puff-profile in the New York Times last week.
• The latest that this information should have been revealed to the public by Lizza was during RFK Jr.’s confirmation hearings, and that’s being charitable.
• I note again that Vox Media not only apparently managed to miss the biggest scandal in the history of American political journalism when “investigating” Nuzzi after the news of the affair surfaced, it affirmatively exonerated her from charges that her relationship with RFK Jr. affected either her mostly admiring profile of RFK Jr. or her extremely influential Joe Biden hit piece. Whoopsie-daisy!
• Have I mentioned that three infants in Kentucky have already died of whooping cough as a direct result of the powerful position Nuzzi violated every possible canon of journalistic ethics to help him obtain? It’s bad, you know.