Newly declassified documents from the National Archives reveal that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. formally requested the Obama administration reopen the investigating into his father’s 1968 assassination, believing evidence suggested a second gunman was involved in the shooting.
In a September 2012 letter to then-Attorney General Eric Holder, Kennedy Jr. sought “a new investigation” based on an audio recording that allegedly captured more gunshots than convicted assassin Sirhan Sirhan’s weapon could have fired.
This request came years before Kennedy Jr. joined the Trump administration and is part of his longstanding conviction that the full truth about his father’s murder remains hidden.
“Paul [Schrade] and his team of nationally prominent attorneys including former U.S. Attorney Rob Bonner strongly believe this new evidence is conclusive and requires a new investigation. I agree and support his request for a new investigation,” Kennedy Jr. wrote in the letter.
Schrade, who was standing beside Robert Kennedy Sr. when he was killed and was himself wounded in the shooting, has maintained that the recording indicated “two gunmen fired at least 13 shots from two different .22 caliber revolvers and from opposing directions.”
This theory contradicts the official government account, which says Sirhan’s eight-shot .22 caliber Ivar Johnson revolver could not have fired that many bullets without reloading, which witnesses say did not occur.
The FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office did investigate the audio tape, which was recorded by a journalist at the Ambassador Hotel. However, the Bureau’s Digital Evidence Laboratory in Quantico concluded in May 2013 that the recording was “of insufficient quality to definitively classify the impulse events as gunshots” and could not “confirm the number of gunshots or determine the identification of specific weapon(s).”
Kennedy Jr.’s has repeatedly requested the federal government reopen his father’s case . In 2018, just before the 50th anniversary of the assassination, he revealed to The Washington Post that he had personally visited Sirhan at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility near San Diego in December 2017.
“I got to a place where I had to see Sirhan,” Kennedy told the Post at the time. “I went there because I was curious and disturbed by what I had seen in the evidence.” After their three-hour conversation, Kennedy Jr. concluded: “I was disturbed that the wrong person might have been convicted of killing my father.”
Kennedy Jr. has said that Paul Schrade was instrumental in convincing him to re-examine the evidence. “Once Schrade showed me the autopsy report, then I didn’t feel like it was something I could just dismiss. Which is what I wanted to do,” Kennedy Jr. told the Washington Post in 2018.
Not everyone agrees with the second-gunman theory. Russell Iungerich, who worked as a deputy attorney general for California when officials reopened the Kennedy case from 1975 to 1976, has dismissed Kennedy Jr.’s claims. “When you add up all the evidence produced at the hearings, there’s no way you can configure the evidence to say that there was a second gunman,” Iungerich said in 2018.
The recent document release is part of President Trump’s January 23, 2025 executive order to declassify files related to the Kennedy assassination, as well as documents about the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the 1968 killing of Martin Luther King Jr.
Kennedy Jr.’s longstanding pursuit of what he believes is the truth about his father’s death offers new context to his current role in an administration that has emphasized government transparency and skepticism toward established institutions.