California attorney Nicole Shanahan expected to be named RFK Jr.’s running mate

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is expected to name California attorney and entrepreneur Nicole Shanahan as his running mate in his independent run for the presidency.

Mediaite is reporting that the domain kennedyshanahan.com was registered a few days ago and has a subdomain that is accepting campaign donations. After the outlet donated $1 using the page, they discovered it was registered by a senior adviser to Kennedy, Link Lipsitz.

Shanahan donated $4 million to a Super PAC that funded Kennedy’s Super Bowl ad, which featured retro footage of his uncle John F. Kennedy during his 1960 presidential campaign. She has described herself as a progressive and has said that children’s health is important to her.

The pair reportedly “align on numerous issues.” This includes Kennedy’s vocal condemnation of dangerous vaccines. Sources close to Kennedy’s campaign told Mediaite that she could be useful helping them raise the funds needed to get Kennedy’s name on the ballot in every state. So far, he has only qualified for the ballot in New Hampshire, Utah, Nevada and Hawaii.

Shanahan was once married to Sergey Brin, the billionaire founder of Google, and has a young daughter with him. Their marriage ended in 2022 following reports that she had an affair with Elon Musk; both parties have denied any involvement. However, Musk and Brin were longtime friends prior to the incident and Musk spent a lot of time at Brin’s home, according to the Wall Street Journal. Following the reported fling between Shanahan and Musk in December 2021, Brin instructed his financial advisors to sell all of his personal investments in companies connected to Musk.

The 38-year-old grew up poor in San Francisco Bay, living off of food stamps and trying to help her parents financially. Her mother was a Chinese immigrant and her father suffered from bipolar schizophrenia.
In an interview with Modern Luxury Magazine, she talked about her difficult childhood and how it resulted in her becoming an entrepreneur: “As a kid, I really had to figure out how the world works on my own. I had two unemployed parents for the majority of my childhood, so not only was there no money, there was almost no parental guidance.”

She started working busing tables when she was just 12 and had a knack for out-of-the-box thinking. “I learned how to compete in really creative ways by making broken objects perform at levels beyond their perceived capacity,” she noted.

Shanahan earned a bachelor’s degree in economics and Mandarin Chinese from the University of Puget Sound and then studied Chinese law and global intellectual property trade at the National University of Singapore before attending law school at Santa Clara University.

In 2013, she founded Clear Access IP, a law firm that leveraged artificial intelligence to work on its clients’ patent portfolios. She moved on in 2020, when she founded Bia-Echo Foundation, a philanthropic effort whose website lists its focus as “reproductive longevity & equality, criminal justice reform and a healthy & livable planet.”

Kennedy’s VP pick to be announced on March 26

Although Kennedy has not said anything definitive about who he might select as a running mate, some of the names that he has mentioned in the past include New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers and former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura.

Although his campaign declined to confirm reports that he has chosen Shanahan, his campaign director, Amaryllis Fox, said: “Nicole Shanahan has indeed been among those conversations on behalf of honest governance, racial equity, regenerative agriculture and children’s and maternal health.”

Fox added: “Her decade-long focus on safeguarding our democracy against the dangers of [artificial intelligence] and leveraging it instead to detect government corruption and abuses on behalf of the people — this is a crucial knowledge base that our current leaders in Washington lack.”

The press office for Kennedy’s campaign said that an official announcement of his running mate in his bid for the presidency will take place in Oakland, California, on March 26.

Sources for this article include:

Mediaite.com

DailyMail.co.uk

TheHill.com