RFK Jr.’s ties to Scientology’s sordid past, and his unity on its goals today

In late January, as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was going through Senate hearings before he was confirmed as the nation’s top health official and will lead the Department of Health and Human Services, some of the toughest questioning was about his connections to a law firm by the name of Wisner Baum.

Senator Elizabeth Warren was particularly focused on whether RFK Jr would continue to receive consulting fees from Wisner Baum, who is suing Merck, the makers of Gardasil, the HPV vaccine.

CBS, CNN, Reuters — basically every major news outlet — closely covered the issue of whether Kennedy intended to continue to receive consulting fees even if he was confirmed to lead HHS (and the answer was yes, he did intend to keep receiving the money, but said he would pass it on to one of his sons).

It was a widely covered story. But what none of those major news outlets mentioned was that Wisner Baum is a law firm led by OT Scientologists who have worked with Kennedy for many years. And one of them, Michael Baum, was even an unindicted co-conspirator in Scientology’s notorious “Snow White Program” that infiltrated the US government in the 1970s.

If you’ve read our book about Paulette Cooper, The Unbreakable Miss Lovely, you will remember the chapters we devoted to a detailed retelling of the Snow White Program (mis-named “Operation Snow White” by the media), the largest infiltration of the US government in history (before DOGE, at least), which resulted in a 1977 raid of Scientology by the FBI. Eleven top church officials, including Mary Sue Hubbard, wife of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, ultimately pleaded guilty to conspiracy and went to prison for their part in break-ins at US government agencies. Others, including Ron Hubbard himself, were named unindicted co-conspirators.

One of them was a young Scientology spy by the name of Michael Baum. When the Snow White defendants pleaded guilty in 1979 rather than go to trial, they signed a Stipulation of Evidence which was a detailed description of what the government found they had done over the course of the program. In that stipulation, the government explained how Scientology operatives repeatedly, for example, broke into Interpol offices in order to steal records regarding Mr. Hubbard.

Over the next month the defendant [Sharon] Thomas and Mr. Baum burglarized the Interpol Liaison Office at the Justice Department on at least three occasions. Those raids netted some three feet of copies of Interpol documents. On each occasion they used the photocopying equipment and supplies located on the fourth floor of the Department of Justice main building and stole the copies.

Like another of the unindicted operatives, Kendrick Moxon, Baum went on to become an attorney, and today is a partner at Wisner Baum. Scientology records indicate that by 1991 he had achieved “OT 6,” one of the highest “Operating Thetan” auditing levels on Scientology’s “Bridge to Total Freedom.”

The “Wisner” in the law firm’s name is for Brent Wisner, a younger man but also an OT Scientologist.

In 2019, Wisner Baum won a lawsuit against Monsanto over its weed killer Roundup, saying that it had caused cancer in users. Kennedy was a consultant on the case, and after the victory he posted this photo to his Facebook account which includes Brent Wisner (second from left), Michael Baum (third from left), and Kennedy himself (second from right).

“I’ve watched many of the great trial lawyers, but none better than Brent. Judges and juries love him for his integrity, lightening-fast wit, easy humor, infectious laugh and buoyant magnetism,” Kennedy wrote about the photo.

Wisner and Baum are also at the center of a controversy we wrote about for The Daily Beast in August: For years the law firm has been pursuing litigation against the two small companies that manufacture the devices used in ECT, a life-saving treatment that puts small doses of electricity into the brains of severely depressed patients.

Scientology hates psychiatry with a white-hot passion, and it has long been the organization’s greatest desire to destroy ECT. If they can put the two small device manufacturers out of business, we explained in the Daily Beast story, doctors will have no choice but to stop using their machines, making ECT unavailable in this country and probably the rest of the world.

It is Wisner Baum that is leading that litigation effort and has been for years.

Meanwhile, Scientology cheers on those efforts through its unhinged front group that agitates against psychiatry, Citizens Commission on Human Rights.

CCHR not only constantly harasses the medical profession for its use of ECT, but also for the prescription of anti-depressants known as SSRIs, claiming, for example, that any mass murder, especially those at schools, are the result of such psychiatric drugs.

Scientific evidence does not support this, but it’s one of the shibboleths of the anti-psychiatry movement, that psych drugs cause mass murders.

And now, as soon as Kennedy was confirmed to lead the HHS, the White House issued an executive order that lists the things it wants him to accomplish, and among those goals is taking aim at antidepressants.

As Mother Jones pointed out, this claim about antidepressants and shootings has been one of Kennedy’s obsessions. And if you read the executive order, it could almost come out of a CCHR pamphlet.

In fact, CCHR knows that in Kennedy, it has a likeminded ally.

Earlier this week we told you about OT Scientologists at the Kennedy Center, in the Ukraine talks, and now involved with the highest health official in the land, who will soon be pushing an agenda very much like Scientology’s own.

And again, we’ll point out we’re not even a month into this new administration.

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Source Code: Actual things founder L. Ron Hubbard said on this date in history

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