Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the son of Robert F. Kennedy. He is the source of an anecdote John Kiriakou repeats about the day of the JFK assassination. As Kennedy told it, on November 22, 1963 his mother pulled him from his McLean junior high after the shooting and drove him home to Hickory Hill, where he got out of the car and heard his father say to CIA director John McCone, "Tell me your people didn't do this." McCone, who Kiriakou notes was dining with the grieving Kennedys nightly after his own wife's death, answered, "I don't know who did it," rather than denying the agency's involvement. Kiriakou's conclusion: the CIA as an institution did not kill Kennedy, but whether elements of it did is "something that we'll never know the answer to." In a separate telling, Kiriakou put Kennedy's age at 11 or 12 at the time.

Kiriakou has separately noted that Kennedy appeared on at least one released Jeffrey Epstein flight log, explaining that his then-wife was friends with Ghislaine Maxwell and had accepted a ride on Epstein's plane to Palm Beach for Easter.

Friendship and the pardon tweets

Kiriakou has noted that Kennedy publicly said he would pardon Julian Assange, drop the extradition charges against him, and do the same for Edward Snowden, around the same time Caroline Kennedy was reportedly in talks with Australian officials about Assange on behalf of the Biden administration. Kiriakou says he considers Kennedy a friend, and that about two weeks before Kennedy announced his 2023 presidential candidacy, Kennedy told him he intended to publish tweets calling for pardons of Julian Assange, Jeffrey Sterling, Reality Winner, Daniel Hale, Chelsea Manning, and Kiriakou himself. At the time, Kiriakou noted Kennedy's Democratic primary poll numbers running around 19 to 21 percent against an incumbent president. He said people around Kennedy hoped for a repeat of the 1968 election, when Eugene McCarthy's strong New Hampshire primary showing against Lyndon Johnson prompted Johnson to withdraw from the race.

See also

- JFK assassination
- John McCone
