What was your first reaction to hearing about the files getting released? 

I don’t know if you ever have heard the story of the boy that cried Wolf. Everyone [gets excited], and then it doesn’t happen. You get all excited. Doesn’t happen. 

Biden promised, along some level, that he would kind of finally, because it’s been hidden for years right? There are millions of files, and the idea was, there’s only a handful of them still out. I mean, what are they saying that is so bad that the president’s like, ‘No, I’ll release them,’ and then once the president kind of sees them, the president’s like “Crap-.” 

… Carter even talked about releasing all those things. And then in Congress, after Watergate kind of went in and released a whole bunch of things that hadn’t been to the public. So it’ll be interesting when you finally see it. [I’m] kind of hesitantly optimistic about what they’ll say.

… I’m a little hesitant that it’s gonna be like “here’s everything.” I think it’s gonna be like ‘Here’s everything’ with lots of things blacked out. I think some of those things are going to be names … things that would be embarrassing to America in connection to other countries. 

Some theorists believe that his stance on issues in Cuba and Vietnam led to his assassination. Do you think foreign policy played a role in that?

LBJ was the most powerful politician in the Senate that’s ever happened. He was supposed to be president in 1960. JFK, with his money and his dad’s money, went around him. LBJ was so certain he was going to win the nomination, and thus the presidency in 1960 that he didn’t even enter any primaries. JFK entered all the primaries along with some other guys. 

Kennedy won most of those primaries and then rode that straight to nomination and got the nomination and then put LBJ as his vice president. LBJ went from being the most powerful person in government, other than Dwight David Eisenhower, … and I think he was just humbled. LBJ had been in Washington as a congressman since 1937, and became senator in 1949. He was an insider, insider guy. One of his best friends was Edgar Hoover, leader of the FBI. He was such a good friend of the family and Edgar Hoover was the master of the secrets. 

Years later, when the Warren Commission is searching into who killed JFK, the information that LBJ basically says, “All information from the Dallas Police and everybody else is going to go through the FBI, and then Hoover will give that to the Warren Commission.” I believe there was a handful of people who felt for LBJ, who felt JFK was taking us down the wrong path, and I believe that they came up with a way to do this, and that it wasn’t just Lee Harvey Oswald being the lone gunner. I just believe there’s too much out there that proves that it was some other kind of things, and they worked through a process to basically, ultimately end up taking their care now there’s a handful of all kinds of circumstantial evidence. All these people who actually first hand saw something other than what the official report is just kind of vanished somehow magically within the course, like the next year or so. And so to me, I’m going like, “Hmm, so I kind of think it was a group of people.”  Now,  I don’t think LBJ said do this, but I think LBJ was smart enough to read between the lines, that there were people who were basically saying something’s going to change. I think that there were people that were afraid he was taking us down a wrong path as a nation, and decided to take matters in her own hands. 

Relating to some of the theories, do you think that some of the firsthand witnesses, such as the Buschusha lady, played a role in the assassination? 

“I think, to me, the more layers that you get, the more likely someone’s gonna say something. Right in the world of what they call psyops, when you try to mess with another country’s country, you start spreading rumors even though it’s not true. They just mess with each other all the time. One of the ways the CIA would mess with stuff is to make the actual thing so confusing that people couldn’t connect dots. So I think that might be part of the whole process. It once so much that they might have been that, but it was then out there, now people are chasing down this. So I don’t know if it’s just this big master web like 87 people all involved in the same thing, I think some of those are designed to keep people chasing down these different paths sometimes.”

Going onto RFK, do you think his stance on the civil rights movement and his potential to become president made him a target for the assassination?

I think it was less civil rights, more in Vietnam. I think there were people that were so into their own version of what had been happening since end of World War II, that the ‘communists were trying to take over the whole world’, and as soon as we blink, we’re gonna basically just have a world now controlled by them, like we almost had a world control by Hitler. I think there were people who were so worried that if Vietnam fell, everything was gonna start falling. 

Then was the women’s rights movement, the civil rights movement, the handicapped movement, the Latino movement. There’s a whole bunch of people who are not happy with what was going on in America. Then, just like, there’s a whole lot of people not happy now, you can see it in the gay movement, trans movement, so there’s always a kind of counterbalance in America of bunch of people who just feel uncomfortable that the world they think they knew is not the world that they’re living in at the moment. 

So I think there’s a whole lot of things. But I think for RFK, he had finally come out strongly on the idea of the ending of the Vietnam War, and at that moment… is probably the second most angry “We hate you. You hate us.” division time in American history, only behind the Civil War.. So I think it was less than that, I think it was more Vietnam. And I think he was also killed by someone other than Sirhan.

… To this day, there’s a lot of really important evidence in that kitchen in the Ambassador Hotel that disappeared without going through the process of basic forensic analysis. Usually when something happens, the police close the place down. The Secret Service comes in, the FBI comes in. 

[There were] bullets that had been lodged in things like door jambs that they actually show pictures of people taking pictures. But the film [of the FBI camera] itself, the original, just disappeared. It was supposed to be in police storage.

[On the film were photos of] the door jamb. For example, there was one that had two bullets lodged in it. And there’s pictures of people taking a look at it, [wondering] how the hell did bullets get in there? And when they counted up all the bullets, they were more than were in Sirhan. Sirhan gun.

Regarding the RFK assassinations, what was the impact/direction of this event compared with JFK?

“So with RFK, I think we tend to think less about that assassination, because he was not yet president, whereas Kennedy was. I think with Kennedy,  he was the guy that got us closest to an actual war that would have ended most human life in the Cuban Missile Crisis. And I think he came out of that with a bit of humility and just understanding of how dangerous the whole game had gotten. I think JFK probably would have done better (in the next election). But I’m not one of those who think JFK was like the one that would have saved America had he lived. He played games with the civil rights movement based on elections, just like anybody else does. I think he would have done a better job, but I don’t think it would have been a night and day type thing. And I think he would have made a much bigger change for America. I think JFK would have been close to the same attack that LBJ would have. It would have been a little different, but I don’t think it would have been kind of a thing. I think RFK would have. He was very different than Nixon, and he would have probably been president for eight years, like Nixon was president for eight years, almost on his resignation.”

How do you think historical narratives about these assassinations evolved over the years? Do you think public opinion has shifted on who was really responsible? (PT 2 12:22)

“It’s just quite a bit. You’re going to see it through a certain kind of lens, no matter what you do, and it’s even going to be hard for historians who are not connected at the time to be truly, utterly objective. … no matter what you do, subconsciously, your eyes are going to see certain things. You’re going to kind of lean towards something else that makes sense. So, there’s no real way to ever get to the one right story of anything in history, this idea of layers of  complexities. I think what happens is people in a moment in time want to believe certain things. I think any of these actual assassinations are so emotion-intense that anything that came out in those first weeks after, because the conspiracy theories that are there, most of them kind of went and just became rumor stone. But after that, other new conspiracy theories based on different kinds of evidence start kind of coming out of that thing. And so the same thing is going to happen in this, the people will see into these new release documents kind of what they want to see in them, not just what they actually themselves represent. They’ll be used, they’ll be used for politics. You watch.”

What roles do you think the government played in Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination?

The Martin Luther King Jr family believes there was a conspiracy. They believe the government killed him. That was not just something they felt. That was based on a number of people who have researched this over the years and have asked to meet with them. And so basically, this is where even Coretta Scott King, towards the end of her life, was like ‘it just makes sense, he had become too much of a danger on too many different lives.’ 

… The generic narrative is, as long as he stayed in his lane of civil rights issues, then the government was kind of fine with him doing those things, because he was always a moderating voice, even though he was asking for change. … And he had more street cred with average, everyday American citizens of both white and black, who wanted to have a better country, but weren’t trying to just change everything at night. So as long as he stayed in that lane, he was fine. 

In 1967, he does his first speech criticizing the Vietnam War, and all of a sudden a whole bunch of people were kind of like, ‘this isn’t even your area of expertise.’ And he’s basically going  ‘Oh, it’s all wrapped in the same thing.’ Because by 1968 he … had come to believe that the problem isn’t racism. The fundamental problem is inequity between those who have and those who don’t. He was actually planning something called the poor people’s march in the spring of 68 right before he got assassinated, and it was going to be this massive march to just ask Congress, ‘you are spending billions of dollars a day. Sometimes when you do big bombings in Vietnam, think about what that money could have been done to help your own citizens who can’t feed their families.’” It was this kind of mindset, similar to what RFK was going to do and they were assassinated two months apart, [caused him to] finally come up on the radar as having now become too dangerous on a whole bunch of levels. 

 being said, when I was doing my work for my research paper, I looked at all kinds of FBI files, … the file as things came the file would [have new information added]. You get to the Martin Luther King Jr file, and it literally is ‘he was shot from across the street from the LA motel. We found a car outside in front.’ … It feels like they’re just going ‘follow the Hansel and Gretel breadcrumbs’. It feels like they already had it all set to point to him and James Earl Ray, who was not a saint in any way, shape or form … kind of a drifter of sorts, who had been involved in lots of crime type stuff. They kind of just found a guy that probably was able to do something that set him up. 

And the King family … met with him, and he says, ‘I just need you to know, I didn’t do it.’ He was a racist guy, so he fit all the mold [of being MLK’s assassinator]. But it feels pretty certain that this is also a setup. And then the ominous part is the last speech that Martin Luther King Jr gives. [During the speech] … he was actually helping to speak out for janitors who were basically asking for a raise. … he was there to support their actual strike. His own people told him not to go and in his last speech, you almost get a feeling like he’s either got a warning something’s gonna happen, because the FBI has been telling him for a while they had been spying on him. They bugged his room. He knew this. There had been death threats all the time … . But that last speech even says, ‘I may not get there with you to the mountaintop.’ In other words, ‘this moment where America is finally nice to each other, I may not get there with you, but I’ve gone over the mountaintop. I’ve seen what it’s going to be like when I get there, and I may not make it with you.’ And It’s almost like he’s predicting his own death, which happens the next day.