RFK Jr. Pushes Debunked Joe Rogan Claim About U.S. ‘Accidentally’ Sending $6 Billion to Ukraine

(AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pushed a debunked claim from popular comedian turned podcaster Joe Rogan about the ongoing war in Ukraine.

“The White House accidentally sent $6 billion to Ukraine. But pennies for Hawaii,” Kennedy wrote on Twitter Monday. Kennedy shared a clip in which Rogan repeated right-wing talking points insisting that money spent to help Ukraine fend off the brutal Russian invasion could instead be used to help Hawaii recover.

“One of the things we went over yesterday, which is a crazy number, we were looking at the amount of money that was accidentally sent to Ukraine. Like they oversent 6 billion. And then I said, Well, how much would it cost to rebuild every house in the Maui fire? And it’s 5 billion. 5 billion? Something like that. That’s just like accidental money. But there’s no talk of doing that. There’s no talk of doing that,” raged Rogan.

Rogan’s guest, former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI), quickly agreed, although she appeared to actually understand what happened with the funds sent to Ukraine.

“It’s happened two or three times now where the Pentagon has said, oh, we miscalculated how much money we had set aside for Ukraine. So we have an extra 4 billion to send now that we didn’t know we had,” Gabbard replied, accurately, but did not correct the content of Rogan’s claim.

“And this has happened a few times. Secretary of State Tony Blinken went to Kyiv yesterday promising, hey, we’re going to give you another billion now. And this is the thing. When I was out there in Maui, person after person was like, ‘Tulsi tell me what would happen if we started to call ourselves Ukraine. You think they would give us some money then to take care of our families, to put up to fix our roofs?’” Gabbard added, also suggesting that somehow funds for Ukraine are taking away from disaster relief.

Rogan first started claiming that the Pentagon “accidentally” sent billions of dollars to Ukraine back in July. His claim, which fueled all kinds of conspiracy theories and accusations of grift, was roundly debunked as Rogan appeared to misunderstand the facts.

Newsweek’s Tom Norton explained:

According to a June 2023 Congressional Research Service report, since August 2021, the Biden administration has authorized 40 drawdowns valued at $22.1 billion.

This, crucially, is where Rogan has misunderstood the facts.

In June 2023, the Pentagon said that it had overestimated the value of weapons sent to Ukraine by $6.2 billion over the past two fiscal years authorized through PDA, according to U.S. Department of Defense press secretary Sabrina Singh.

The Pentagon overestimating the value of the equipment it sent to Ukraine is in no way “accidentally” sending money to Ukraine, where tens of thousands of civilians and soldiers have been killed by invading Russian forces. Furthermore, the federal government spent over $6.27 trillion dollars in 2022 and while debating foreign military aid is certainly a legitimate topic, aid to Ukraine in no real way impacts the amount of federal funds available for disaster relief.

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