OAN’s Elizabeth Volberding
3:30 PM – Monday, January 15, 2024
Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. defended his family’s role in wiretapping notable Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., characterizing the action as a “political calculation.”
On Sunday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK Jr.) justified his family’s decision to approve government monitoring of Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK Jr.), saying that it was a “necessary measure” given the political tensions during the Civil Rights time frame.
RFK Jr. made his eyebrow-raising remarks on the eve of the MLK Jr. U.S. holiday while he was visiting Atlanta, Georgia, for a campaign trip. He informed Politico in an interview that “there was good reason” for Robert F. Kennedy to approve FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s wiretap on MLK Jr.
RFK Jr. claimed that since both his father and late President John F. Kennedy were “making big bets on King, particularly in organizing the March on Washington,” they had given the go-ahead for the wiretapping of MLK Jr.
The wiretapping occurred while Robert F. Kennedy was serving in his position as the 64th United States attorney general.
“They were betting not only on the civil rights movement but their own careers. And they knew that Hoover was out to ruin King,” RFK Jr. stated, referring to then-FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover.
According to RFK Jr., the Kennedy administration had a “legitimate reason” to support Hoover’s intent to monitor King. MLK Jr. was viewed by the FBI director as a “dangerous radical” who had “Communists in his inner circle.”
“There was good reason for them doing that at the time,” RFK Jr. explained. “Because J. Edgar Hoover was out to destroy Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement and Hoover said to them that Martin Luther King’s chief was a communist. My father gave permission to Hoover to wiretap them so he could prove that his suspicions about King were either right or wrong. I think, politically, they had to do it.”
Some have argued that RFK Jr. may be ruining his reputation for voters as a political truth-teller who defends marginalized constituencies if he continues to justify his family’s involvement in what is generally referred to as a “disgraceful episode” in presidential history.
More information has now surfaced regarding the FBI’s extensive surveillance campaign aimed at the Civil Rights leader than what was disclosed in declassified government documents. Most famously known, the FBI reportedly suggested to MLK Jr. in a letter that he “should commit suicide.”
A “yearslong multifaceted operation designed to destroy King” was how Betty Medsger described the FBI’s campaign against King in her 2014 book “The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI.”
“The plot involved office break-ins, use of informers, mail opening, wiretapping, and bugging of King’s office, home and hotel rooms,” Medsger added.
On Sunday, RFK Jr. stated that his uncle and father would have fully known about Hoover’s animosity toward civil rights groups, declaring that the FBI director “left no doubt where he stood on those issues” while calling him a “racist.”
However, the independent presidential contender also asserted that if his uncle had not been assassinated in the fall of 1963, he would have removed Hoover from office during his second term as president.
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