The Trump administration on Friday released previously classified documents related to the 1968 assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, fulfilling a promise to bring “maximum transparency” to the federal government’s probe into his killing.
More than 10,000 documents were posted online, the first tranche in what will be a series of record disclosures related to the RFK assassination, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said.
An additional 50,000 related documents were discovered while officials scoured FBI and CIA warehouses for records, and those will be released at a later date.
“Nearly 60 years after the tragic assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, the American people will, for the first time, have the opportunity to review the federal government’s investigation, thanks to the leadership of President Trump,” Ms. Gabbard said in a statement.
Mr. Trump issued an executive order soon after taking office that determined releasing the files on the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert and Martin Luther King Jr. was “in the public interest.”
While thousands of pages of JFK assassination files have been released over the years, the JFK and MLK documents “had not been digitized and sat collecting dust in facilities across the federal government for decades,” Ms. Gabbard said.
Robert F. Kennedy was shot just after midnight on June 5, 1968, at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles after delivering a victory speech following his California Democratic presidential primary win. He died the next day.
His son, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said releasing the files “is a necessary step toward restoring trust in American government.”
King was assassinated two months before RFK Jr., on April 4, 1968, on a hotel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee. There have been many conspiracy theories about the CIA’s involvement in King’s death, but none of them have been proved. The CIA and FBI were secretly surveilling King.
In a 1999 lawsuit brought by the King family, a jury unanimously found he was murdered as the result of a conspiracy involving the U.S. government that included the Mafia and local, state and federal government agencies that were “deeply involved” in his killing.
When he ran for president last year, Mr. Kennedy pledged to release the files if elected. He said overwhelming evidence existed of CIA involvement in President Kennedy’s killing.
