Robert F. Kennedy's daughter, Kerry Kennedy, on Saturday expressed the deep "pain" she and her family felt upon seeing photos of her father’s autopsy released by the Trump administration, following his 1968 assassination.
In January, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to declassify remaining secret files related to the 1960s killings of President John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert F. Kennedy, and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.
After the photos were released Friday, Kerry Kennedy posted on X, stating that remembering her father "will be hard in a new and unimaginable way."
"We won't just see him as we remember him. Instead, we'll be confronted with graphic, explicit photos of his mangled body from an autopsy report," she added.
Trump had said in January that "everything will be revealed" as he ordered the records released, in an apparent bid to clear up conspiracy theories surrounding the assassinations.
The Republican leader had accepted redactions over national security concerns in a tranche of archives he ordered released during his first term but later promised the full records.
Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard posted Friday, also on X, that she was "honored... to lead the declassification efforts and to shine a long-overdue light on the truth."
The 10,000 pages relating to Robert Kennedy released this week will be followed by an additional 50,000 discovered "in the course of searching FBI and CIA warehouses," Gabbard added.
Kennedy's son, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has become close to Trump and now serves as his secretary of Health and Human Services.
The younger Kennedy has questioned the official conclusion that Jordanian-born Sirhan Sirhan, convicted of RFK's June 1968 murder, fired the fatal shot. He had pressed Trump to release all remaining information.
Sirhan, who was apprehended in the hotel where the 42-year-old Kennedy was shot, remains in prison.
Some conspiracy theorists have suggested that a second gunman fired the fatal shot, but a voluminous review by the FBI concluded that "the overwhelming evidence underscores the fact that Sirhan Sirhan was the sole assassin."
Kennedy told the Washington Post on Friday that he did not "expect there would be a smoking gun in any of this" to support his theory of CIA involvement in his father's murder.
He acknowledged to the Post that "it was an agonizing choice for me" when Trump asked him whether the autopsy photos should be included.
But, he said, "the public interest in full disclosure outweighs our family's interest."
DNI Gabbard on Friday offered her "deepest thanks for Bobby Kennedy and his family's support."
However, Kerry Kennedy, in her post on X, wrote, "I did not support this."
She took a broader swipe at the Trump administration, under which she said "countless others are suffering even more" than the Kennedys.
Kerry Kennedy pointed especially to migrants deported to El Salvador, laid-off federal workers, and transgender people fearing for their rights.
"The Trump administration may think they can bury us with pain, but we will rise from it, louder and fiercer than ever," she wrote.
