WASHINGTON — More than 10,000 pages of previously classified documents related to the 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy have been released — and are available online for the public to scour.
The trove of files, published at President Trump’s directive, were previously sitting in storage at the National Archives, according to 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.”
The New York senator was shot dead by Sirhan Sirhan, then 24, at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles shortly after delivering a victory speech upon winning California’s Democratic presidential primary.
The charismatic 42-year-old was widely seen as being on the cusp of a Kennedy family restoration to the White House.
Sirhan, a Palestinian Christian whose family moved to the US while he was a child, said years later that “I did it for my country” in protest of US military 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 recorded jailhouse conversation.
“He used his influence. He used his power, used his authority to kill people by words rather than by his hands.”
Sirhan’s attorney at one point, however, claimed he was framed.
RFK Jr ran for president as a Democrat last year against the party’s incumbent president, Joe Biden, before switching to an independent candidacy and then ultimately endorsing Trump.
He’s previously said he’s not convinced that Sirhan Sirhan fired the shot that killed his father — and met with the convicted assassin in a California prison in 2018.
“I got to a place where I had to see Sirhan,’’ he told the Washington Post in an interview the 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, noting that he had reviewed an autopsy and police reports as well as spoken with witnesses.
“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 oversaw the document release, also is a former Democrat. As a Hawaii congresswoman she ran for president in 2020 on an antiwar platform and last year also endorsed Trump.
Administration sources cautioned ahead of the release of the RFK files that few if any obvious bombshells appeared to be lurking.
Trump on Jan. 23 ordered the declassification of files pertaining to Kennedy’s murder, as well as documents about the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the 1968 killing of Martin Luther King Jr.
Documents on the King case have not yet been released.
