The documents don't look too good for Sirhan Sirhan.
The CIA released 1,450 additional pages of documents related to the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy on Thursday, including 54 previously classified documents and revealing records on his killer -- and no evidence of a wider conspiracy.
The files shed more light on the motivations of Sirhan Sirhan, the Palestinian-born Jordanian citizen convicted of Kennedy's murder after the June 5, 1968, shooting in Los Angeles -- and contain a psychological profile of the gunman as well as his handwritten notes.
A July 8 personality assessment by the feds declared that "under no circumstances would we have predicted that [Sirhan] was 'capable' of doing what he did."
"Obviously, we cannot see him as part of a conspiracy," the assessment also states. "He could be a tool of a conspiracy in the sense that the attempted assassin of Secretary of State [William] Seward and the assigned assassin of Vice President Andrew Johnson (George Atzerodt) were tools of the [John Wilkes] Booth conspiracy."
"It is very unlikely however that he could have effectively acted under precise instructions," it goes on. "Essentially, we see Sirhan as being much more like the impulsive assassins of [James] Garfield and [William] McKinley than the calculating assassins of Lincoln and President [John F. ] Kennedy."
"Kennedy must fall Kennedy must fall. Please pay to the order of Sirhan Sirhan," reads a note that appears to predate Sirhan's other private journal entries from May 19, 1968, previously published by The Washington Post.
"We believe that Robert F. Kennedy must be sacrificed for the cause of the poor exploited people," another note proclaims, adding that the then-presidential candidate would "eventually be felled ... by an assassin's bullet ... tonight tonight tonight."
Those seem pretty damning, but I don't think this is new-news. Images of the notes are here, thanks to Trump's executive order.
The guy writes "Robert F. Kennedy must be assassinated" over and over and over again, just like you'd expect an obsessive lunatic to do.
A June 12, 1968, psychological profile of Sirhan Sirhan had described him as having "high intellectual potential," and being "quite intuitive," with a belief that "communism may appear as an ideal solution."
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has previously claimed he's unconvinced that Sirhan, now 81, fired the bullet that killed his father -- even meeting with the convicted assassin in a California prison in 2018.
"I got to a place where I had to see Sirhan,'' the younger Kennedy told the Washington Post in an interview that year. "I went [to the prison] because I was curious and disturbed by what I had seen in the evidence."
"I was disturbed that the wrong person might have been convicted of killing my father," he added, referencing Kennedy's autopsy, police reports and witness accounts.
In a 2021 San Francisco Chronicle op-ed, Kennedy accused part-time hotel security guard Thane Eugene Cesar of killing his father.
"I firmly believe the idea that Sirhan murdered my dad is a fiction that is impeding justice," he wrote at the time in petitioning for the convicted killer's parole, which was immediately slammed by his Kennedy relatives.
Other records released Thursday shed new light on a trip that the future attorney general and senator from New York took with then-Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas to the Soviet Union in 1955, during which Kennedy "served the Agency as a voluntary informant."
The intelligence gathered by Kennedy during his trip was recorded in an extensive 129-page diary, which was passed on to the CIA.
RFK also provided the CIA with more than 1,000 photographs and videos of various locations he visited during his USSR tour.
A CIA official told The Post that the documents about Kennedy's journey "exemplifies the depth of his patriotism and commitment to serving his country," knowing that "the USSR was our top adversary at the time."
I'm working on an Iran post. There's a lot of news.