About 10,000 pages of records related to the 1968 assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy were released Friday, including a handwritten note by the gunman that said the Democrat “must be disposed of.”
The release continued 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 a speech celebrating his victory in California’s Democratic presidential primary. His assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, was convicted of first-degree murder and is serving life in prison.
The files included pictures of handwritten notes by Sirhan.
“RFK must be disposed of like his brother was,” read the writing on the outside of an empty envelope with the return address from the district director of the Internal Revenue Service in Los Angeles.
In one of the newly release documents, the assassin said he advocated for “the overthrow of the current president.” Democrat Lyndon Johnson was in the White House at the time of RFK’s death.
“I have no absolute plans yet, but soon will compose them,” wrote Sirhan, who pledged support for communist Russia and China.
FBI documents describe interviews with a group of tourists who had heard rumors about Kennedy being shot weeks before his death. Several people who visited Israel in May 1968 said a tour guide told them Kennedy had been shot. One person said he heard that an attempt on Kennedy’s life had been made in Milwaukee. Another heard that he was shot in Nebraska.
The National Archives and Records Administration posted 229 files containing the pages to its public website. Many files related to the assassination had been previously released, but others had not been digitized and sat for decades in federal government storage facilities.
The release 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 did not 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. His administration’s release of once-hidden files opens the door for additional public scrutiny and questions about the operations and conclusions of institutions such as the CIA and the FBI.
Trump signed an executive order in January calling for the release of government documents related to the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., who were killed within two months of each other.
Lawyers for Kennedy’s killer have said for decades that he is unlikely to reoffend or pose a danger to society, and in 2021, a parole board deemed Sirhan suitable for release. But Gov. Gavin Newson rejected the decision in 2022, keeping him in state prison. In 2023 , a different panel denied him release, saying he still lacks insight into what caused him to shoot Kennedy.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a son of the New York senator who now serves as health and human services secretary, commended Trump and Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, 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.
