WASHINGTON (AP) — Approximately 10,000 pages of records related to the 1968 assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy were released Friday, continuing the disclosure of national secrets ordered by President Donald Trump.
Kennedy was fatally shot on June 5, 1968, at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles moments after giving his victory speech for winning California’s Democratic presidential primary. His assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, was convicted of first-degree murder and is serving life in prison.
The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration posted 229 files containing the pages to its public website. Many files related to the senator’s assassination had been previously released, but others had not been digitized and sat for decades in storage facilities maintained by the federal government.
“Nearly 60 years after the tragic assassination of Senator 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,” Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, said in a statement.
Gabbard also said the files release “shine a long-overdue light on the truth.”
The release of the RFK files comes a month after unredacted files related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy were disclosed. Those documents gave curious readers more details about Cold War-era covert U.S. operations in other nations but didn’t initially lend credence to long-circulating conspiracy theories about who killed JFK.
Trump, a Republican, has championed in the name of transparency the release of documents related to high-profile assassinations and investigations. But he’s also been deeply suspicious for years of the government’s intelligence agencies, and his administration’s release of once-hidden files opens the door for additional public scrutiny and questioning about the conclusions and operations of institutions such as the CIA and the FBI.
Trump signed an executive order in January calling for the release of governmental documents related to the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., who were killed within two months of each other.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a son of the Democratic New York senator who now serves as the U.S. Health and Human Services secretary, commended Trump and Gabbard for their “courage” and “dogged efforts” to release the files.
“Lifting the veil on the RFK papers is a necessary step toward restoring trust in American government,” the health secretary said in a statement.
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AP writer Eric Tucker contributed.
