A consultant for Robert Kennedy Jr.’s 2024 campaign registered the website for Kennedy and his potential vice presidential selection, New York Jets quarterback and fellow vaccine skeptic Aaron Rodgers, according to digital records reviewed by Rolling Stone.
Kennedy recently told The New York Times that Rodgers was on his shortlist for vice president — though he appeared to pop that trial balloon on Friday. “We have an extraordinary person, I can’t tell you who it is, but it’s not any of the people they’ve been talking about,” the candidate told supporters. He plans to announce his running mate on March 26.
Digital footprints suggest the Kennedy campaign’s Rodgers talk was relatively serious, a prospect that reportedly worried Kennedy’s donors and would have represented an incredible new twist in Rodgers’ already-confounding trajectory — from the affable Super Bowl-winner who guest-hosted “Jeopardy,” to a guy best-known for spouting conspiracy theories on TV.
While Kennedy’s campaign is considered a longshot, Democrats believe his presence in the race poses a major threat to President Joe Biden’s reelection effort against former President Donald Trump.
DomainTools, a database of website registration and other information, shows the domain kennedyrodgers.com was created on March 4 — eight days before the Times reported that Kennedy was considering Rodgers.
The owner of kennedyrodgers.com has not created a homepage for the domain. Visitors are greeted with a standard landing page from its registrar, GoDaddy.
However, Rolling Stone discovered a working subdomain of the site, pay.kennedyrodgers.com, which allowed users to submit a payment via GoDaddy. A $1 test donation by Rolling Stone produced a credit card payment receipt bearing the name of GOP strategist Doug Stafford — a longtime adviser to Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) who recently joined the RFK Jr. campaign as a consultant.
The website was taken offline Friday evening after Rolling Stone contacted Stafford.
In recent days, Stafford has regularly touted and defended Rodgers on X (formerly Twitter). “I’d rather have Aaron Rodgers on Ayahuasca as VP than Mike Pence or God forbid Dick Cheney or any other neocon like them,” Stafford posted Wednesday, after the Daily Mail reported that the quarterback was on an ayahuasca trip in Costa Rica when the Times broke the news that he could be Kennedy’s VP selection.
In a post about Kennedy’s planned vice presidential announcement, scheduled for March 26, Stafford wrote: “Oakland, CA. I wonder what’s near there… ????????????.”
Rodgers played college football nearby at the University of California, Berkeley, and grew up a few hours away in Chico.
Stafford also defended Rodgers in the wake of a report from CNN that the quarterback has privately shared false conspiracy theories about the Sandy Hook massacre — a claim that Rodgers denied on Thursday.
“Can’t tell you how shocked I am to see @cnn just fucking lied to smear @AaronRodgers12 because they think they can and that no one will hear the truth later,” Stafford posted at 3:14 am ET on Friday.
Kennedy told supporters at a dinner Friday that he’s going with someone else for VP, in a video posted on X. “It’s somebody that is going to surprise people, and I think that the country is really going to fall in love with” he said.