Getty Robert F. Kennedy says the CIA murdered JFK.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. accused the CIA of murdering his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, in a tweet on December 16, 2022. He called the JFK assassination a “successful coup d’etat.”
“The most courageous newscast in 60 years. The CIA’s murder of my uncle was a successful coup d’état from which are democracy has never recovered,” RFK Jr. wrote, sharing a broadcast by Fox News’ host Tucker Carlson.
Robert F. Kennedy has taken other controversial positions in recent years. Previously, RFK Jr., the son of Robert F. Kennedy, also questioned the official narrative on the assassination of his own father, saying the lone gunman theory is contradicted by audio evidence and bullet trajectories. He has drawn the ire of some members of the Kennedy family for his stances on vaccines. The latter sparked a 2019 rebuke from three members of the Kennedy family, who wrote that they believed RFK Jr. was “tragically wrong about vaccines,” Politico reported.
The other members of the Kennedy family have not yet commented on RFK Jr.’s statement on the CIA and the John Kennedy assassination. The family divided sharply over Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s pushing for the parole of Sirhan Sirhan, convicted of assassinating his father, with two siblings joining his call but six others and Ethel Kennedy opposing it.
Here’s what you need to know:
The Warren Commission Found that Lee Harvey Oswald Was a Lone Assassin, But the Tucker Carlson Broadcast Claimed the CIA Was Involved in Murdered JFK
PBSLee Harvey Oswald’s mugshot (PBS/Frontline)
In the broadcast that RFK Jr. shared, Tucker Carlson said he had spoken to someone with direct knowledge of documents still being withheld by the government on the John F. Kennedy assassination.
“We spoke to someone who had access to these secret documents,” Carlson said, adding that he asked the person whether the CIA had “a hand in the murder of John F. Kennedy, an American president?”
“The answer is yes. I believe they were involved. It’s a whole different country from what we thought it was. It’s all fake,” Carlson said the person responded. He did not name that person but said they were “not a conspiracy theorist we spoke with” but were “someone with direct knowledge” of information that is “once against being withheld from the American public.”
Carlson said that all of the people mentioned in the documents still being withheld by the government are dead. He said the CIA was a “government within a government.”
Carlson noted that Jack Ruby, another supposedly lone gunman, murdered Lee Harvey Oswald, named by the Warren Commission as the lone gunman who assassinated JFK. “What are the odds of that?” he said, comparing it to being struck by lightning.
Carlson called it a “bizarre chain of killings” and called the Warren Commission “shoddy and corrupt.”
He accused the CIA of admitting “under duress that it had withheld information from investigators about its relationship with Lee Harvey Oswald” and he said the phrase “conspiracy theory” did not enter the American lexicon until 1964.
The title of the broadcast was, “The CIA and JFK.” Carlson said questions have “multiplied with time.”
He said a psychiatrict who was “working for the CIA at the time” named Louis Jolyon West visited Ruby in a jail cell and found him “technically insane” even though Ruby had seemed sane to others. “What was this guy doing in Jack Ruby’s prison cell?” asked Carlson.
“You can see why non crazy people would wonder about what had really happened,” he said.
He noted that a House special committee in 1976 investigated the JFK assassination anew and found the president was murdered as a result of a conspiracy. Carlson said the “obvious suspect was the CIA.”
In 1992, Congress passed a records collection act mandating full disclosure of government records relating to the assassination by 2017, but that did not happen under Donald Trump or Joe Biden’s administrations, said Carlson.
“We still can’t see them,” he said of thousands of documents still being withheld. “It’s to protect an institution. But why?”
You can read a full transcript of Carlson’s broadcast here.
The CIA Theory in the JFK Assassination Has Circulated for Years
GettyJFK may have been the last sitting President to attend the funeral of a former First Lady.
The CIA theory into the JFK assassination is not a new one. In 2007, Rolling Stone ran a story called “The Last Confession of E. Howard Hunt.” It’s one of many investigatory pieces exploring the CIA’s alleged ties to Oswald and to the assassination.
Of Hunt, the magazine wrote, “In the CIA, he’d helped mastermind the violent removal of a duly elected leftist president in Guatemala and assisted in subterfuges that led to the murder of Che Guevara.”
That article is based on the account of Hunt’s son, St. John, who said his father confessed to knowledge of the JFK assassination. Rolling Stone wrote:
That time in Miami, with Saint by his bed and disease eating away at him and him thinking he’s six months away from death, E. Howard finally put pen to paper and started writing…
E. Howard scribbled the initials ‘LBJ,’ standing for Kennedy’s ambitious vice president, Lyndon Johnson. Under ‘LBJ,’ connected by a line, he wrote the name Cord Meyer. Meyer was a CIA agent whose wife had an affair with JFK; later she was murdered, a case that’s never been solved. Next his father connected to Meyer’s name the name Bill Harvey, another CIA agent; also connected to Meyer’s name was the name David Morales, yet another CIA man and a well-known, particularly vicious black-op specialist. And then his father connected to Morales’ name, with a line, the framed words ‘French Gunman Grassy Knoll.’
None of the men named was ever arrested or charged in the death.
RFK Jr. Has Previously Questioned Whether Sirhan Sirhan Was the Lone Assassin Who Murdered His Father, Robert F. Kennedy
GettySirhan Sirhan (left) and Robert F. Kennedy.
Thane Cesar is the security guard who was standing behind Robert F. Kennedy when the presidential candidate was assassinated in Los Angeles, a crime for which Sirhan Sirhan was convicted.
For years, Cesar lived a relatively quiet life, building a family in the Philippines. However, just hours after Cesar died – on September 11, 2019 – Kennedy’s son, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., took to Instagram to build the case that Cesar may have “murdered my father.”
RFK Jr. – who met with the man convicted of being his dad’s assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, in prison – has publicly raised questions before about a question that some thought was already closed but researchers have been raising for years: Who killed RFK at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles?
Sirhan Sirhan was convicted of murdering Robert Kennedy. He admitted it at his trial, but that was strategic because his lawyers pursued a diminished capacity argument. He’s also claimed he has no memory of the assassination. Some believe he was a pawn in a bigger plot. It’s clear that Sirhan Sirhan was at the scene, and probably that he opened fire (even RFK Jr. says Sirhan Sirhan was shooting toward RFK). Sirhan Sirhan was seen firing at Kennedy by multiple witnesses. He also wrote about killing RFK in journals. He wrote “RFK must die” in his diary and authorities thought that the date of the assassination tied into the “one year anniversary of the Six-Day War.”
Whether he killed RFK or the candidate was felled by a second gunman’s bullet is the core question. The San Francisco Chronicle, back in 2008, wrote about questions in the death, noting the fact that the coroner “reported that the fatal shot was fired less than one inch from Kennedy’s head behind his right ear.” Four shots came from the rear but Sirhan fired a .22 “from a few feet in front of Kennedy.” The revolver held eight rounds, but “a radio reporter’s tape recording of the shooting has sounds of what one audio expert describes as 13 shots” and “double shots,” reported The Chronicle, summing up the main concerns.
FacebookThane Eugene Cesar
In his Instagram post, RFK Jr. wrote that Cesar was “directly behind my dad” when RFK was shot.
Thane Eugene Cesar died today in the Philippines. Compelling evidence suggests that Cesar murdered my father. On June 5, 1968, Cesar, an employee in a classified section of Lockheed’s Burbank facility, was moonlighting as a security guard at the Ambassador Hotel. He had landed the job about one week earlier. Cesar waited in the pantry as my father spoke in the ballroom, then grabbed my father by the elbow and guided him toward Sirhan. With 77 people in the pantry, every eyewitness said Sirhan was always in front on my father at a 3-6 feet distance. Sirhan fired two shots toward my father before he was tackled. From under the dog pile, Sirhan emptied his 8 chamber revolver firing 6 more shots in the opposite direction 5 of them striking bystander and one going wild . By his own account, Cesar was directly behind my dad holding his right elbow with his own gun drawn when my dad fell backwards on top of him. Cesar repeatedly changed his story about exactly when he drew his weapon. According to the Coroner, Dr. Thomas Noguchi, all 4 shots that struck my father were ‘contact’ shots fired from behind my dad with the barrel touching or nearly touching his body. Cesar sold his .22 to a co-worker weeks after the assassination warning him that it had been used in a crime. Cesar lied to police claiming that he’d disposed of the gun months before the assassination. Cesar was a bigot who hated the Kennedys for their advocacy of Civil Rights for blacks. I had plans to meet Thane Eugene Cesar in the Philippines last June until he demanded a payment of $25,000 through his agent Dan Moldea. Ironically, Moldea penned a meticulous and compelling indictment of Cesar in a 1995 book and then suddenly exculpated him by fiat in a bizarre and nonsensical final chapter. Police have never seriously investigated Cesar’s role in my father’s killing.
READ NEXT: Read more about Thane Eugene Cesar.