COLLEGE PARK, MD — Long classified files pertaining to the 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy are now available to the public, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard revealed to The Daily Wire in an exclusive interview.
“Today is a big day,” Gabbard said during an interview from the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. “It is the first time the country will be able to see the documents that have been sitting here, at the National Archives records agency, around the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy.”
Speaking from the lab where government employees busily worked to prepare documents to be digitized, scanned in high capacity scanners, and then ultimately uploaded to the National Archives website, Gabbard said the files are ready to go after decades under lock and key.
“These are boxes that have been here, in storage, never scanned before, never reviewed by the public before,” Gabbard said. “Thanks to President Trump’s leadership, and his executive order mandating maximum transparency, we have had well over a hundred people who have been working around the clock, going page by page, scanning them in, going through these reviews…all to lead us to this day, where the 10,000 pages that have been sitting here are now going to be available online.”
The batch of newly available files is now available on the National Archives website.
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Kennedy, who served as Attorney General of the United States in his brother’s presidential administration, was elected to the Senate in 1965. He announced his presidential campaign in 1968, while representing New York in the upper chamber. On June 5, 1968, Kennedy was shot and killed by Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian immigrant, during a campaign event at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. He was pronounced dead the next day.
Sirhan admitted that he shot Kennedy in a 1969 trial, though he claimed he had no memory of doing so. Two decades later, Sirhan told British journalist David Frost that he felt betrayed by Kennedy — whom he once viewed as a hero — due to his “support of Israel.”
Kennedy’s autopsy report found that the senator was killed by a shot fired behind the ear — though Sirhan was standing in front of Kennedy — leading some to speculate that Sirhan did not fire the fatal bullet.
One proponent of the second gunman theory: Kennedy’s son, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
“The people that were closest to [Sirhan], the people that disarmed him all said he never got near my father,” Kennedy said in 2018. That year, RFK Jr. had traveled to California to meet with Sirhan, saying he “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. My father was the chief law enforcement officer in this country,” Kennedy said at the time. “I think it would have disturbed him if somebody was put in jail for a crime they didn’t commit.”
RFK Jr. supported Sirhan’s 2021 parole request, which California Governor Gavin Newsom rejected.
Trump signed an executive order shortly after his inauguration declassifying all files pertaining to the assassinations of RFK, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. Trump in March released around 80,000 pages of previously secret files pertaining to JFK’s 1963 assassination, which revealed, among other things, that some Cuban diplomats at the time immediately concluded the CIA was behind the assassination.
As Gabbard previewed the release of the files on Thursday, she warned The Daily Wire that they may challenge details of the current narrative surrounding Kennedy’s death.
“Of course there are a lot of different theories and questions surrounding these assassinations,” Gabbard explained on Thursday.
“People will find in the release today, there is no ‘smoking gun,’ but there are a lot of things that have not been previously known that really call into question what really happened — and who was behind it, which includes conversations that were happening in other countries, and messages that were going around about the assassination itself.”
Senator Robert F. Kennedy announcing his candidacy for president of the United States, Washington, D. C. (Photo by Arnold Sachs/Consolidated News Pictures/Getty Images)
Asked about what other countries were involved, Gabbard pointed out a diplomatic cable that’s part of the 10,000 files that National Archives staff had placed out for her to view.
“If you look on this memo alone, you see Kuwait, London, Tel Aviv, Beirut, Benghazi…all of these American embassies who were the recipients of this cable,” she explained. “People are going to have to go to the website and read for themselves to kind of get an insight into what the conversations were like before, and after, Senator Kennedy’s assassination.”
“There are more questions than answers,” she warned.
Gabbard repeatedly stressed the importance of transparency in releasing these files to the public, noting that people will have to dig into them themselves in order to understand the realities of what they hold. Such was the case with the release of the files related to John F. Kennedy’s assassination. While the files offered a deeper picture into the American president’s death, they did not offer immediate answers or solutions.
“President Trump is ushering in a new era of maximum transparency,” Gabbard said at the time.
In addition to the RFK files, the National Archives facility in College Park is home to records pertaining to the JFK assassination and other historical artifacts, including the last will and testament of Adolf Hitler.
The historical artifacts related to the JFK and RFK assassinations are housed in a secure vault for safety, where Executive for Research Services Chris Naylor took Gabbard on Thursday afternoon.
Inside, Naylor showed the passport Lee Harvey Oswald carried when he defected to the Soviet Union, as well as his passport application and the shirt he was wearing when he was shot and killed. Also showcased was the camera used to record what is best known as the Zapruder film, the home movie that provides the most complete view of JFK’s 1963 assassination in Dallas, Texas.
“There’s so many stories behind all of this,” Gabbard said as the tour concluded. “It’s incredible to be here, to actually see it.”
As she strolled down the hall with Jim Byron, the senior advisor to the acting head archivist, Gabbard asked why the JFK artifacts aren’t showcased to the public, including the bullet that struck the deceased president.
Gabbard and Byron agreed that the artifacts should be opened up to the public.
“That’s how it works in this administration,” she said with a laugh.
