The Trump administration announced Friday that it had begun publishing thousands of pages of confidential documents about the Democratic senator regarding the 1968 assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy.
President Trump’s file release is supported by the senator’s son, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of Health and Human Services. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. believed there might be a second gunman for a long time, and claimed that Silhan Silhan, the convicted assassin of his father, did not fire a fatal shot.
“Lifting the veil with RFK paper is a necessary step to restoring confidence in the US government,” Kennedy said in a statement. “I praise President Trump for his courage and his commitment to transparency. I also thank Tarsi Gabbard for her efforts to eradicate and declassify these documents.”
Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles shortly after midnight on June 5, 1968, after celebrating his victory in the California presidential primary.
Shortly after the murders that were captured on television cameras and broadcast around the world, 24-year-old Palestinian immigrant Silhan was arrested.
Silhan was captured at the scene with a .22 caliber handgun. He was also writing a manifesto seeking Kennedy’s death.
“Kennedy must be assassinated on June 5, 1968,” he wrote.
The date marks the one anniversary of a six-day war between Israel and its neighbors Egypt, Syria and Jordan. Israel won decisively, gaining territory such as the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and the Old Town of Jerusalem.
However, Silhan’s gun only has eight bullets held, and new evidence has emerged over the years suggesting that 13 shots could have been fired that night.
National Intelligence Director Tarsi Gabbard said in a statement that the previously classified roughly 10,000 pages of records of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy and Pastor Martin Luther King Jr. “We’ve been collecting dust at federal facilities for decades.” Now they have been scanned and uploaded by the National Archives, she said, and they can be viewed online with limited edits for privacy reasons at archives.gov/rfk.
“Nearly sixty years after the tragic assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, the first American citizen to consider a federal investigation thanks to President Trump’s guidance,” Gabbard said in a statement. “My team is honoured that the President led the declassification efforts and entrusted us to shed long-term light on the truth. I am grateful for Bobby Kennedy and his family for the support.”
During the 2024 election campaign, Trump pledged to fully disclose previously classified records regarding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and Pastor Martin Luther King Jr., and Trump signed an executive order last month to declassify records, and his administration released a cache of 1963 supporters’ supplementary documenting.
The 10,000-page file released on Friday in Robert K. Kennedy is just the first batch of files related to his assassination.
The Director of National Intelligence’s office said in a news release Friday that 50,000 pages of additional land was discovered for documents that had not been handed over to the National Archives during a search for CIA and FBI warehouses. According to the office, the agency is working to make these documents public and will continue to search more records through government facilities.
This story will be updated.
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