Over 10,000 pages of previously classified records concerning the 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy have now been made available to the public, following a declassification order by President Trump.
These once-hidden materials, which had been stored in the National Archives, were released under the supervision of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
“Lifting the veil on the RFK papers is a necessary step toward restoring trust in American government,” said the late senator’s son, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
“I commend President Trump for his courage and his commitment to transparency. I’m grateful also to Tulsi Gabbard for her dogged efforts to root out and declassify these documents.”
Robert F. Kennedy, then a senator from New York, was gunned down by 24-year-old Sirhan Sirhan shortly after delivering a victory speech at Los Angeles’ Ambassador Hotel, celebrating his win in the California Democratic primary.
At just 42, Kennedy was considered a frontrunner for the presidency and seen by many as a symbol of a potential return of the Kennedy legacy to the White House.
Sirhan, a Palestinian Christian who immigrated to the United States as a child, would later explain his motive by citing anger over American support for Israel.
“Robert Kennedy would not have waited for me to lick his boots, nevermind to persuade him to stop sending Phantom jets and arms to kill my countrymen with,” Sirhan said in a 1980 prison recording. “He used his influence. He used his power, used his authority to kill people by words rather than by his hands.”
Though Sirhan was convicted, his legal representation once asserted he had been set up.
RFK Jr., who entered last year’s presidential race as a Democrat opposing Joe Biden before launching an independent bid and eventually endorsing Trump, has expressed longstanding doubts about the official version of events.
He said he wasn’t certain Sirhan was the person who fatally shot his father and visited the convicted killer in prison in 2018 to examine the case more closely.
“I got to a place where I had to see Sirhan,’’ he said in a Washington Post interview that same year. “I went [to the prison] because I was curious and disturbed by what I had seen in the evidence.”
“I was disturbed that the wrong person might have been convicted of killing my father,” RFK Jr. added, saying he had reviewed forensic documents, autopsy results, and had conversations with people who were there that night.
“My father was the chief law-enforcement officer in this country. I think it would have disturbed him if somebody was put in jail for a crime they didn’t commit.”
Gabbard, who managed the declassification process, has also broken with her former party. A past Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii, she ran for the presidency in 2020 on a platform centered around ending U.S. military interventions. She, too, threw her support behind Trump last year.
Officials familiar with the archive release said prior to publication that there didn’t appear to be any explosive revelations in the documents.
President Trump issued the order to declassify these RFK-related files on January 23, along with records tied to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and the killing of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. The MLK documents have not yet been released.
{Matzav.com}