Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Director of Health and Human Services, reached out to the Obama administration regarding an audio recording that might have captured his father’s assassination in 1968. This audio reportedly contains more gunfire than what the weapon used by the convicted assassin could have produced.
In September 2012, officials from the Trump administration were presented with a letter from former Attorney General Eric Holder, among many documents released by the National Archives. These documents were part of a federal investigation into Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
There were requests for a “new investigation” into his murder, which included a letter from Paul Schrade, the former vice president of the United Auto Workers, who was injured in the shooting on June 6, 1968.
RFK Jr. noted that his father was side by side with Schrade at the time, who was himself struck by a bullet.
Schrade’s legal team, including himself and former U.S. attorney Rob Bonner, believes the new evidence merits a fresh investigation, a viewpoint echoed by RFK Jr.
Additional documents released on Wednesday indicated that RFK Jr.’s request had been forwarded to the FBI’s Los Angeles office. The FBI launched an investigation into audio tapes recorded at the assassination scene.
Schrade alleged that the audio revealed “two gunmen fired at least 13 shots from conflicting directions with two different .22 caliber revolvers.”
He pointed out that the convicted assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, wouldn’t have been able to carry out the shooting with his .22 caliber revolver, which held only eight rounds and would have necessitated a reload during the chaos.
The tapes were sent to the FBI’s Digital Evidence Institute in Quantico, Virginia, for analysis. However, the investigation was unable to definitively assess the number of gunshots on the recordings.
The FBI’s report stated, “The designated areas recorded in specimen Q1 were inadequate in quality to clearly classify impulse events as gunshots.” It also mentioned that investigators couldn’t confirm the number of shots or identify the weapons used based on the audio.
This release of documents was part of an executive order issued by Trump on January 23 regarding the confidentiality of files related to Kennedy’s murder, which also encompassed materials linked to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968.
