RFK Jr. applauds Trump’s move to declassify info on JFK, RFK and MLK’s deaths

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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. - son of the murdered senator and nephew to the slain president - on Friday cheered President Donald Trump’s move to declassify documents related to the killings of the two Kennedys as well as Martin Luther King Jr.

Trump’s plan to declassify information related to the killings of Robert F. Kennedy, John F. Kennedy and civil rights icon King comes after decades of intense speculation over their deaths. The government’s long-standing position of keeping the full findings of its investigations led some to cast doubt on the official record. 

“A government that withholds information is inherently fearful of its citizens’ ability to make informed decisions and participate actively in democracy,” Kennedy, who is Trump’s pick to run the Department of Health and Human Services, said in a statement. 

Kennedy has long questioned the narrative of his own father’s death at the hands of Sirhan Sirhan in 1968. He welcomed Trump’s decision as a chance to recapture the vision of America his father, uncle and King were pursuing.

“Thank you, President Trump for trusting American citizens and for taking the first step down the road towards reversing this disastrous trajectory,” Kennedy said.

Trump’s executive order Thursday will not immediately release the assassination files. 

The order requires the director of national intelligence and the attorney general to work with White House officials on a plan to release the John F. Kennedy records and present it to Trump within 15 days. A plan for releasing the other records must be presented to Trump within 45 days.

Millions of government records related to the Kennedy assassination have been released but some information remains classified and redacted. Trump's order notes that the federal government also hasn't released all information related to the other two assassinations.

Kennedy shared a quote from his uncle implying that the former president would have supported releasing the files.

“The very word ‘secrecy’ is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secrecy,” Robert Kennedy Jr. wrote, referring to a speech his John F. Kennedy gave in 1961. “We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it.”

JFK grandson slams RFK Jr.

Not all Kennedys have applauded Trump’s move to declassify information related to the killings of their family members.

JFK’s grandson Jack Schlossberg slammed Trump’s executive order. 

“The truth is a lot sadder than the myth — a tragedy that didn’t need to happen. Not part of an inevitable grand scheme,” he wrote in a statement. “Declassification is using JFK as a political prop, when he’s not here to punch back . . . There’s nothing heroic about it.”

But Schlossberg did welcome the impending release of the files as a way of shaming RFK Jr., who he says “spewed a lot of lies about the JFK assassination.”

“Now since Trump did the declassification and RFK Jr. can’t hide behind that anymore," Schlossberg said in a video addressed to podcast host Joe Rogan who indulged in RFK Jr.’s speculation on his show, “you should have him back on your show and go through all the stuff that’s coming out because there’s not going to be anything there and he will obviously be proved to have been lying.”

OK, what’s the official story? And unofficial?

Behind each of the killings, there’s an official story of who killed each man and why based on eyewitness testimony, court findings and other documentation.

• JFK assassination on Nov. 22, 1963: JFK, known for his glamour and steering the country through potential nuclear war, was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. He was shot and killed as his presidential motorcade brought him along a downtown city street and as he waved to adoring bystanders from the open-roofed car. Less than an hour later, police arrested Lee Harvey Oswald, who was killed on live TV two days later as police moved him to a county jail. The President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, known as the Warren Commission, concluded Oswald - and his killer Jack Ruby - acted alone.
• The doubt comes from those who regard the commission’s work as a government-orchestrated coverup. Conspiracy theorists lay the blame on everyone from Cuba — at the heart of the nuclear missile crisis — to the CIA itself.
• MLK assassinated in Memphis, April 4, 1968: King was killed on the balcony outside his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had gone to march alongside striking workers. He had stepped outside to speak with colleagues in the parking lot below and was shot in the face by an assassin. James Earl Ray, a 40-year-old escaped fugitive, later confessed to the crime and was sentenced to a 99-year prison term.
• But Ray later tried to withdraw his confession, said he was set up by a man named Raoul and maintained he did not kill King to his death in 1998. Decades later a Memphis tavern owner and a former FBI agent both also claimed a figure named Raoul was behind the killing.
• RFK killed in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968: Kennedy’s father was killed at the Ambassador Hotel shortly after the presidential candidate had declared victory in the California Democratic primary. After thanking supporters in a hotel ballroom, he then went through the hotel kitchen which he was told was a shortcut to a press room. Sirhan killed him as he shook hands with a hotel busboy. The assassin remains in prison.
• The doubt for RFK’s assassination’s comes from eyewitness testimony that Sirhan fired from in front of the presidential candidate when the fatal bullet came from just behind his head, according to RFK documentarian Shane O’Sullivan. The filmmaker also cited a recording indicating there was a second gun and the word of RFK’s coroner who has called for the case to be reopened. 

This story has been updated with a new video.