In a lengthy, heavily promoted live interview on FOX News's Hannity Monday evening, Democrat candidate for president Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. made the case for his challenge to President Biden.  He also made news by restating his recent contention that the CIA was complicit in the assassination of his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, in Dallas on November 22, 1963.  Video of the interview is here.

It was at least the third live interview that Kennedy has given to FOX News since he declared his candidacy on April 19, 2024.  Previously, Kennedy appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight on April 19 (video here) and in a lengthy, commercial-free chat with Neal Cavuto on Saturday, April 22 (video here).

The interview with Sean Hannity got off to a cordial start.  From the FOX News transcript of the segment provided to this author:

SEAN HANNITY, FOX NEWS HOST:  Robert Kennedy Jr. joins us now. Great to have you back, sir. How are you?

ROBERT KENNEDY JR., PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE:  How are you, Sean? It's good to be back. ...

Hannity immediately asked Kennedy "what is the evidence?" to support his recent claim that the CIA was involved in JFK's assassination.

KENNEDY:  Well, you know, there's millions of pages of documents — of CIA documents, of transcripts, and recorded conversations from the Cuban embassy in Mexico City from — I mean, it's — to summarize the evidence, as I said in that — in that podcast, there are confessions of people who were directly involved in the plot or involved in the planning of the plot, who were peripheral to the plot. There's a 60-year cover-up.

The Warren Commission was run by Allen Dulles who was a head of the CIA that my uncle fired, and then insinuated himself onto the Warren Commission, and essentially ran the Warren Commission and kept this evidence from the Warren commissioners.

By the way, 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. There were multiple people involved and most the people in that investigation believe that it was the CIA that was behind it, because the evidence was so overwhelming to them.

Screenshot of RFK Jr. on Hannity.  Courtesy of FOX News.

Hannity interjected that the "magic bullet" theory of the JFK assassination "never made any sense" to him.

KENNEDY:  Yeah. Well, none of it — none of it made — I mean, Jack Ruby — even when I was a little boy, Sean, I was in the White House. My uncle was, you know, laying at rest in the East Room being waked, I was standing at the main floor the White House with my Aunt Jackie Kennedy and my father and my mother.

And President Johnson came in and told us that Lee Harvey Oswald had just been killed by Jack Ruby. And my — and I said to my mom at that point, I turned to her and I said, why did he kill him? Did he love our family?

Well, you know, that's a lingering question. What was Jack Ruby doing there?

My father, when he investigated Jack Ruby, he found out that Jack Ruby had been deeply involved with Carlos Marcello's mob, with Sam Giancana, and all the people who are — all of those mob leaders, Santo Trafficante, who were Havana casino owners, who had been recruited by the CIA in the Castro murder plot. So, they were all working together in cahoots with the CIA.

By the way, the day that my uncle was killed, I also picked up (sic) at Sidwell Friends School and brought home. The first phone call that my father made after J. Edgar Hoover told him that his brother has been shot was to the CIA desk officer in Langley who's only a mile from our house.

HANNITY:  Yeah.

KENNEDY:  And my father said to him, did your people do this? His next call was to Harry Ruiz who was one of the Cuban Bay of Pigs leaders who had remained very, very close to our family and to my father. My father asked him the same question.

Then, my father called John McCone, who was the head of CIA and asked him to come to the house. McCone came over.

And when I came home Sidwell Friends School, my father was walking in the yard with John McCone, and my father was posing the same question to him, was it our people who do this to my brother? It was my father's first instinct that the agency had killed his brother.

Hannity next pivoted the discussion to RFK, Jr.'s campaign.

HANNITY: Do you agree with me that I do not believe Joe Biden is cognitively strong enough to be president?

KENNEDY:  You know, I don't have enough information about that because I am not seeing Joe Biden.

(CROSSTALK)

HANNITY:  I'm not asking you to be a doctor. But when you look at him, does he seem like he's got it together? Come on, be honest. Does he seem like he has it together --

KENNEDY:  You know what, I — yeah, I — you know, I have questions. But I — you know, I will leave that to other people. I think of Joe Biden — the reason I'm running is because I don't like what Joe Biden is doing with this country.

I don't like the war in Ukraine that we have been — we could've — we should've settled out a long time ago. We're sending $113 billion over there. The entire budget of EPA is $12 billion. The budget of CDC is $12 billion.

We have 57 percent of Americans who could [not] put their hand on a thousand dollars if they had an emergency. We have a quarter of Americans who are going to bed hungry. Food stamps last month when we announced — you know, we topped off these huge payments to Ukraine, and at the same time, $300 billion Silicon Valley Bank. We've cut food stamps by 90 percent to 30 million Americans.

On to COVID-19 and vaccines — a subject Kennedy has been out front on as the founder and chairman (he's currently on hiatus) of Children's Health Defense.

HANNITY: One position you've taken has resonated with conservatives and that has to do with COVID vaccines. You take the issue a little bit further in terms of vaccinations in general.

I'm not a scientist. I'm not going to debate you on the medical merits of it. But I know on COVID vaccines, they told the American people that if they got that vaccine, they would never get COVID, and they would never transmit COVID. And that turned out to be false.

KENNEDY:  Yeah. And, Sean, they knew it was false at the — at the time they said it because in May 2020, in fact, I posted on Instagram at the time, and they removed me. In May of 2020, they announced the monkey studies. They had given, you know, the vaccines to the macaque monkeys and then they had exposed them to COVID and there was an equal amount of COVID in the nasal pharynges of the vaccinated and the unvaccinated monkeys.

So, their own animal studies were showing that this vaccine had no possible barrier against transmission. And during the Pfizer studies, and both Moderna studies, they never studied whether or not if it was going to block transmission because they already knew from the animal studies it would not, but they went ahead and told the American people something they knew was not true — if you get the vaccine, you won't get COVID, you will not spread COVID to other people. And that simply was deceitful.

Hannity concluded the conversation on an amicable note and appeared to offer Kennedy an open invitation to return.

HANNITY:  Well, listen, we love to have you back for a longer discussion, I think your 20 percent in the polls is very respectable. And I think Joe [Biden] is more vulnerable than people think, and I think he should debate you out of fairness. But if he won't debate you, we'll give you airtime as often as you want, okay?

KENNEDY:  Thank you.

HANNITY:  All right. Appreciate you being with us.

Peter Barry Chowka is a veteran journalist who has covered national politics and the politics and economics of health care, popular culture, and media for over five decades.  His web page with links to his work is http://peter.media.  Peter's extensive American Thinker archive: http://tinyurl.com/pcathinker.  Follow Peter on Twitter at @pchowka.