We now have a Secretary of Health and Human Services who has lost part of his brain to a worm and who has lied about pharmaceuticals and vaccines to advance his financial interests as a lawyer. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (Junior), says he will be open minded, which I suppose means that the worm can come and go as it pleases. Junior has made a career of radical environmental activism, anti-vaccine quackery, and shameless self-promotion. It is hard to imagine that those stripes will go away. In any event, Junior is now in charge of a sprawling federal department, which he has repeated called corrupt and venal.
It is remarkable that Junior is still a lawyer in New York state, where he unlawfully swiped road kill, let it molder in his van, and then unlawfully dumped it in Central Park. For some time, Junior has been listed by a lawsuit industry firm, Morgan & Morgan, as one of its own. When I checked last week, Junior was still listed, although he had been reduced to a stub without any biographical information. Today, the Morgan & Morgan website has scrubbed all mentions of Junior, presumably with industrial-strength cleaner.
Junior’s intelligence may be minimal, but at least it is real, not artificial. His former (?) lawfirm, which ranks number 42 in the country by head count, is facing possible sanctions for citing non-existent, fake cases in motion papers submitted in federal court.[1] Judge Kelly H. Rankin, of the District of Wyoming, noted that the Morgan & Morgan lawyers cited nine cases, eight of which were bogus.[2] The lawyers from Junior’s lawfirm acknowledged that the bogus cases had been “hallucinated” by the firm’s internal artificial intelligence platform; they never were.[3] Morgan & Morgan was not the first to deploy so-called A.I. and it will likely not be the last.[4]
Will we see Junior hallucinate evidence to support his anti-vaccine views?
[1] Debra Cassens Weiss, “No. 42 law firm by head count could face sanctions over fake case citations generated by AI,” Am. B. Assn J. (Feb. 10, 2025).
[2] Wadsworth v. Walmart Inc., Case 2:23-cv-00118-KHR, Order to Show Cause (D. Wyo. Feb. 6, 2025).
[3] Kathryn Rubino, “Massive Law Firm Gets Caught Hallucinating Cases,” Above the Law (Feb. 14, 2025).
[4] See, e.g., Mata v. Avianca, Inc., No. 22-CV-1461 (PKC), 2023 WL 3696209 (S.D.N.Y. May 4, 2023); United States v. Hayes, No. 2:24-CR0280-DJC, 2024 WL 5125812 (E.D. Cal. Dec. 16, 2024); United States v. Cohen, No. 18CR-602 (JMF), 2023 WL 8635521 (S.D.N.Y. Dec. 12, 2023).
