Kennedy Jr. described the decision as a political necessity, stating that there was a "good reason" for his father to authorize the wiretap, which was carried out by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
Kennedy Jr., 69, explained that Hoover was determined to undermine Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, alleging that 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," he said. "I think, politically, they had to do it."
These comments contrast with Kennedy Jr.'s public image as a staunch defender of civil liberties and a critic of federal intelligence agencies' overreach. The environmental lawyer and vaccine skeptic has previously accused the CIA of orchestrating the assassination of his uncle, former President John F. Kennedy. He has also argued for the innocence and parole of Sirhan Sirhan, the man convicted of murdering his father.
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In May last year, Kennedy Jr. told Fox News host Sean Hannity that the Warren Commission, which was tasked by President Lyndon Johnson to investigate JFK's assassination, concealed crucial evidence. "When Congress, 10 years later, investigated the crime with much more evidence than the Warren Commission had at its disposal, Congress found that, yeah, it was a plot. It was a conspiracy [and] there were multiple people involved," he said.
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In 2018, Kennedy Jr. revealed to the Washington Post that he had visited Sirhan in prison after reviewing police and autopsy reports of his father's assassination and speaking with several witnesses. "I was disturbed that the wrong person might have been convicted of killing my father," he said. "My father was the chief law-enforcement officer in this country. I think it would have disturbed him if somebody was put in jail for a crime they didn’t commit."
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John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963, while Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered by James Earl Ray in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968. Just over two months later, Robert F. Kennedy, then a senator from New York, was shot dead in Los Angeles after winning California's Democratic presidential primary.
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Under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, Hoover's FBI targeted Martin Luther King Jr. through its domestic counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO), but failed to substantiate any communist ties. Kennedy Jr. acknowledged that Hoover was "a racist" and would likely have been dismissed had JFK won re-election in 1964. However, he expressed less suspicion about the FBI's motives for eavesdropping on King.
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Kennedy Jr. also noted that during King's rise, the Kennedy administration was "making big bets on King, particularly in organizing the March on Washington." He added, "They were betting not only the civil rights movement but their own careers. And they knew that Hoover was out to ruin King."
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Kennedy Jr. further claimed that his uncle privately informed Martin Luther King Jr. about the FBI's wiretaps. He recently headlined a campaign event with Angela Stanton-King, a former GOP congressional candidate in Georgia who received a pardon from former President Donald Trump in February 2020 and now works for the Kennedy Jr. campaign.
A November New York Times poll showed Kennedy trailing both Trump and President Biden by roughly 10 percentage points in a hypothetical three-way race for six battleground states.
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