Former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is facing an investigation by a federal agency for cutting the head off of a whale carcass with a chainsaw and driving across state lines with it 20 years ago. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration confirmed to CNN on Monday that they had opened a probe. 

Mr. Kennedy on Saturday said at a rally for President Trump in Arizona that he was the victim of “the weaponization of our government against political opponents.”

“I received a letter from the National Marine Fisheries Institute saying that they were investigating me for collecting a whale specimen 20 years ago,” Mr. Kennedy said at the Arizona rally.

Mr. Kennedy’s daughter, Kick Kennedy, said in a 2012 interview with Town and Country that the Kennedy children were in the car while their father was driving the whale head home strapped to the top of the car with bungee cords.

“Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet,” Ms. Kennedy said of the five-hour car ride with her family. “We all had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us.”

NOAA would not comment further to CNN on the “ongoing” investigation into the Kennedy scion.

Mr. Kennedy, during his independent run for presidency, faced multiple stories about his relationship with animals or their carcasses. A profile of Mr. Kennedy in Vanity Fair included a photograph of the candidate eating a charred, grilled animal carcass in the mountains of Patagonia. Mr. Kennedy later said that it was a lamb. The writer of the profile asserted that it was a dog carcass because Mr. Kennedy had reminisced about a friend telling him to try tasting some cooked dog at a restaurant during a trip to South Korea. 

The more famous story, one Mr. Kennedy openly admitted to, was that time he discovered a bear cub carcass on a road in New York, and — hoping to try bear meat for himself — threw the body in the back of his car. By the time he had finished his day’s activities, however, there was no time to return the cub carcass to his home to refrigerate it, so Mr. Kennedy left the carcass in Central Park.