Exclusive: Nicole Shanahan Tells Newsweek Why She's Running With RFK Jr.

Nicole Shanahan, a patent attorney specializing in technology and the former wife of Google founder Sergey Brin, has been named Robert F. Kennedy Jr's. vice presidential running mate.

"I want somebody who will look out for young people and not treat them as if they're invisible," Kennedy said in an interview with Newsweek. "She's just 38 years old; she comes from technology and understands social media."

Kennedy made the announcement Tuesday at an event in Oakland, where Shanahan grew up in poverty with her mother, who emigrated from China, and her father, who had a substance abuse problem and suffered from mental disorders.

Shanahan, a lifelong Democrat, told Newsweek she has grown disillusioned with the party over what she sees as a lack of progress on environmental issues and children's health, and because it has helped to rack up a $34 trillion national debt and has no strategy to secure the southern border.

"My plan is to leave the party, and I don't take that lightly," Shanahan told Newsweek. "I always thought Democrats were the party of compassion and the working class, and that incremental assistance could change people's lives."

She has experience with the latter. Her family survived partially on food stamps and welfare while she and a brother grew up in Oakland. Her mom worked as a caretaker to an elderly woman before putting herself through college and becoming an accountant.

"They loved each other and did their best, but it's hard growing up when your parents struggle to keep working and you're one misfortune away from not having a car or a home," she said.

How Shanahan Joined Kennedy's Campaign

Shanahan is critical of the way the press has framed Kennedy "as an anti-vaxxer whose own family doesn't support him," recalling that she initially bought into the description, dismissing his candidacy until a friend she described as "a Silicon Valley mom" urged her to do her own research.

"She told me to listen to one interview of Bobby. Any interview would suffice. After I did, I discovered there was definitely a misalignment between what I thought and who he really is," she said. "I didn't even know he was an environmental lawyer. And he's not an anti-vaxxer; he's just someone who takes vaccine injuries seriously."

Shanahan told Newsweek that her daughter with Brin, born in 2018, has autism and other special needs and that she "wholeheartedly attributes that to environmental toxins," a topic near and dear to her heart and a cornerstone of Kennedy's campaign.

Shanahan said she first met Kennedy via Zoom; supported him when he was running against President Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination; yanked her support after he became an independent; then reversed course again, famously signaling she had done so by helping to bankroll a Super Bowl commercial that touted his candidacy.

She said that when she met with Kennedy and his family at a dinner party at his home in Southern California a month ago, it was her fiancé, Jacob Strumwasser, who floated the idea that she'd be a good vice president.

Kennedy said that Shanahan was among his top four choices, the others being NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers; Mike Rowe, the host of TV's Dirty Jobs; and motivational speaker Tony Robbins, though the latter was eliminated due to contractual problems involving his businesses.

At last month's dinner party with the Kennedys she was especially supportive of Rowe for vice president, until Strumwasser noted that it was actually Shanahan who possessed all of the qualities Kennedy said he was looking for in a candidate.

She also informed Kennedy at that gathering that the Super Bowl commercial was a "test," because the official line from her party was that he couldn't win and that he'd split the vote and ensure another Donald Trump presidency.

"After the ad, he immediately polled in the double digits and he was trending nationally. It was a far more positive response than I had imagined," she said. Thus, she told him that she'd consider accepting a vice presidential candidacy should he offer her the opportunity, which he did a few weeks later.

Why Kennedy Chose Shanahan

Kennedy, who is polling third behind Biden and Trump, told Newsweek that his inner circle of 17 people had been referring to Shanahan, whose dad is of Irish-German decent, by her code name, "The Irishman," to avoid leaks, though her name as a serious contender surfaced a few weeks ago.

"I wanted someone who is not in league with big pharma, big agriculture and the processed food industries that are poisoning our children," Kennedy said. "She's a mom, and I need someone who understands the struggle to keep children healthy."

"We didn't want an insider because they're the ones who broke the system and ran up a $34 trillion debt and pretend it's okay," added Kennedy, "They're the ones who shut down the country during COVID; they're the ones who are normalizing a chronic disease epidemic."

Shanahan also brings much-needed cash to the campaign. While Kennedy said he did not pick her for that purpose, his doing so allows her to spend much more of her own money on an effort to gather the signatures necessary to get the ticket on ballots in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

Shanahan told Newsweek she has a budget in mind for that effort, though she declined to provide details. A spokesman for the Federal Election Commission told Newsweek that personal funds are not subject to limitations as long as a candidate doesn't take public funding, which none of the 2024 candidates have done.

While Shanahan is a self-made woman, rising from poverty to found multiple companies and philanthropic foundations, much of her wealth is derived from her five-year marriage to Brin, an irony not lost on Kennedy, who has been critical of Google.

Kennedy has accused Google and its YouTube asset of censoring his views related to the downside of vaccines, the war in Ukraine and Biden's approach to the COVID-19 pandemic.

"The government shut down small businesses and we were forcefully locked in our homes in front of screens; so Google, Facebook, Microsoft and the rest, they all made a killing," Kennedy said.

Why Shanahan Went Independent

While Democratic leadership used to understand struggles like her family experienced, Shanahan said that over the past decade and especially in the last three years, it has become "the party of the very elite, and I didn't come from that place."

Asked why conservatives might support two lifelong Democrats for the presidency and vice presidency, Shanahan said, "Democrats and Republicans aren't as divisive as we're told to be, especially when it comes to conservation and childhood health."

She added: "I've met with a lot of conservative mothers who know that chemicals don't belong in our water, that farmers need our help to grow healthy food and that fiscal responsibility is of the utmost importance."

She also said that she, like Kennedy, supports a wall in at least some sections along the southern border as well as far more "diplomacy" with the Mexican government to stop the flow of people from various nations crossing into the United States.

One area where she won't find much solidarity with conservatives is in her support of George Gascon, the Los Angeles district attorney whom the right blames for a 4 percent rise in violent crime since he took office in 2021 and a 24 percent surge in property related crimes.

But Shanahan said that she was supportive of Gascon when he was San Francisco's district attorney and, in her capacity as a legal technologist and a fellow at the Stanford Center of Legal Informatics, she helped produce a report analyzing a 2015 scandal where it was revealed that several members of the San Francisco Police Department exchanged racist and homophobic text messages.

She says she's less impressed with the job Gascon has done in Los Angeles, and she notes that when Gascon's successor in San Francisco, Chesa Boudin, was accused two years ago of being dangerously soft on crime, she not only agreed but also helped fund the successful effort to recall him.

"He took my research in a different direction. He went too far," she said of Boudin.

Beyond her work as a lawyer and tech entrepreneur, Shanahan invests in scientific research, reproductive longevity and equality, sometimes by way of her Bia-Echo Foundation.

She also serves as founder and CEO of ClearAccessIP, a patent analytics company involved in artificial intelligence, giving her expertise that she'll leverage "to detect government corruption," according to a social-media post from Amaryllis Fox, Kennedy's campaign director and daughter-in-law.

Kennedy called the slings and arrows aimed his way since announcing his candidacy "surreal," and acknowledges that Shanahan is in line for similar treatment. "But she's tough, and she has a clear idea of who will be coming after her."