Two Democratic senators have opened an investigation into whether Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. lied to Congress about his reason for a 2019 trip to Samoa, weeks after Democrats regained control of both chambers in the midterm elections.
Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland wrote on Wednesday to Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine non-profit Kennedy formerly chaired, saying they were beginning an investigation into evidence that he “unlawfully lied to Congress on multiple occasions”. They asked the group to hand over a broad range of documents by 4 December, covering Kennedy’s Samoa travel, his 2024 presidential campaign and his Senate confirmation process.
The inquiry turns on what Kennedy told senators during his confirmation hearings in January 2025. He repeatedly said his visit to Samoa had “nothing to do with vaccines”, describing its purpose as introducing a medical-records information system.
But documents published in August by the Associated Press and The Guardian, obtained through an open-records lawsuit brought by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, appeared to tell a different story. In a letter dated 20 January 2019 to Samoa’s then prime minister, Tuila’epa Sa’ilele Malielegaoi, written on Children’s Health Defense letterhead, Kennedy proposed that his team assess “what happened with your MMR vaccines” and said he wanted to study the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine in the Pacific island nation. The letter used the words “vaccine” or “vaccination” eight times.
A month later the prime minister replied that Samoa could benefit from such an assessment and invited Kennedy to visit. Kennedy travelled to Samoa four months after that, in mid-2019, and met anti-vaccine activists there, according to the senators’ letter. Months later, a measles outbreak swept the island nation, killing 83 people, most of them children under five.
The Department of Health and Human Services has maintained that the Samoa visit “was unrelated to vaccines” and said in August that any claim Kennedy lied under oath or to Congress was “not only false but outright defamatory”. No criminal charge has been brought and no finding of false testimony has been made; the senators’ letter does not carry the force of a subpoena, though it puts Children’s Health Defense on notice that its records are now sought by Congress.
Wyden is the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee and is set to take over as its chairman when Democrats assume the majority in January; Alsobrooks sits on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. Wyden had previously called for a criminal investigation of Kennedy’s testimony about the trip. The inquiry is one of a wide array of investigations Democrats plan into the Trump administration after regaining control of the House and Senate. The account of the letters rests on the reporting of the Associated Press and The Guardian; the underlying documents have not been independently verified by The Hourly News.
Sources: Associated Press — https://www.louisianafirstnews.com/news/health/health-minute/ap-senators-probing-rfk-jr-s-testimony-on-samoa-trip-after-ap-and-guardian-showed-documents-refute-it/ ; The Guardian.
