Two Democrat senators cooked up a revenge probe against Robert F Kennedy Jr before they even collected their committee gavels.
Their press allies swear it’s nothing more than a simple question of honesty under oath.
And Ron Wyden would rather nobody remember one old exchange he started himself.
Two Senators Dug Up a 2019 Trip to Go After Kennedy
US Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) and US Senator Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD) fired off a letter to Children’s Health Defense, the medical freedom group Kennedy once chaired, announcing an investigation into whether the Health and Human Services Secretary lied to Congress.
The whole thing hangs on a trip Kennedy took to Samoa back in 2019.
During his 2025 confirmation fight, Kennedy told senators the visit had “nothing to do with vaccines.” He told Wyden he traveled there “to introduce a medical informatics system that would digitalize records in Samoa and make health delivery much more efficient.”
Then in August, The Associated Press and The Guardian published a January 2019 letter Kennedy sent the Samoan prime minister on the group’s letterhead. The AP counted the words vaccine or vaccination eight times.
Wyden and Alsobrooks wrote that “it appears this statement was false.” They didn’t bother pretending to keep an open mind, either. “We intend to hold Secretary Kennedy accountable for the grave harm he has caused to vulnerable children,” the pair wrote.
That doesn’t sound like two lawmakers hunting for the truth. It sounds like a verdict hunting for paperwork.
The Letter Democrats Love to Quote Says More Than They Admit
But look at the actual line Democrats keep waving around. “I would propose my team conduct detailed health informatics assessment in Samoa of what happened with your MMR vaccines,” Kennedy wrote.
Health informatics. Same two words Kennedy gave Wyden under oath.
And Kennedy had a reason to write. In July 2018, two Samoan babies died after nurses improperly prepared their MMR shots, and the country halted its vaccination program in the aftermath. Any parent would want answers after a tragedy like that, and Kennedy offered to dig through the records.
Did the letter talk about vaccines? Obviously. Did the trip Kennedy described to senators center on records and data systems? His own letter says so. Democrats want to build a perjury case out of the space between those two answers, and that space looks a whole lot narrower than the headlines let on.
HHS hasn’t budged. A department spokesperson insisted the visit “was unrelated to vaccines” and called any suggestion that Kennedy lied under oath “not only false but outright defamatory.”
Democrats also blame Kennedy for the measles outbreak that swept the island in late 2019 and killed 83 people, most of them small children. Wyden once declared that “Kennedy’s anti-vaccine agenda is directly responsible for the deaths of innocent children.” He never seems to mention that Samoa had already stopped vaccinating kids after the 2018 deaths, months before Kennedy ever put pen to paper.
The Document Grab Wanders Far From the Island
Here’s where the honesty talk gets awfully thin.
The senators didn’t stop at Samoa. They demanded records tied to Kennedy’s 2024 presidential campaign, his Senate confirmation, a speech at the group’s September conference, and every contact between Children’s Health Defense and federal officials since President Trump took office in January 2025. They set an early December deadline.
None of that has a thing to do with a trip in 2019.
But Wyden and Alsobrooks can’t actually force anybody to hand over a single page yet. Wyden serves as the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee and stands to take the chairman’s seat in January, while Alsobrooks looks to be in line for the gavel on the health committee. Until then, the letter is a wish list with no teeth.
Come January, the wish list becomes a subpoena list.
The same pair also opened a second probe into gifts a donor and former employee reportedly gave Kennedy. CNN reports several Democrats, including newly elected senators, have floated impeaching him next year. And right after the midterms, Alsobrooks posted on X: “The time is now.”
Ron Wyden Already Watched a Real Fib Walk Free
Wyden has stood in this exact spot before. In March 2013, he asked Barack Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, whether the NSA collected “any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.”
“No, sir,” Clapper answered. “Not wittingly.”
Edward Snowden’s leaks soon showed the agency had been scooping up Americans’ phone records on a massive scale. Clapper later admitted his answer was “clearly erroneous” and called it the “least untruthful” thing he could say.
Obama kept him on the job through the end of his presidency. Nobody ever charged him, and Clapper went on to become one of Trump’s loudest critics on cable news.
That was the nation’s top spy misleading the Senate about warrantless surveillance of millions of Americans. Kennedy’s supposed crime is describing a records project as a records project.
Maybe that sells Wyden short. Perhaps he simply cares an awful lot about sworn testimony these days.
But his party’s last President handed Dr Anthony Fauci a preemptive pardon in January 2025, years after US Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) sent the Justice Department a criminal referral over Fauci’s testimony on gain-of-function research. Fauci insisted he “never lied before the Congress.” Democrats took him at his word and moved on.
The Senator Who Masked Toddlers Wants to Talk About Children
Alsobrooks deserves her own close look. As Prince George’s County Executive, she stretched her county’s indoor mask mandate to children as young as 2 in October 2021.
“As a parent, I know it is not easy to mask younger children,” she said at the time, before adding that “we are just going to have to do more.” Months earlier, she kept her county’s indoor mask rule in place after Governor Larry Hogan lifted Maryland’s statewide mandate.
Now she’s lecturing the country about “grave harm” to “vulnerable children.” Parents who watched their kids lose years of normal childhood to lockdowns and mask rules might have a question or two for her first.
Democrats Picked Hearings Over Healthy Kids
The motive isn’t hard to spot. Kennedy runs the MAHA agenda that goes after food dyes, chronic disease, and the cozy relationship between federal health agencies and the drug companies they’re supposed to police. Democrats would rather drag him through hearings than explain why so many American children are sick.
Expect Kennedy’s Samoa letter on a giant poster board the moment the new Senate gavels in. Expect the document demands to keep growing.
And if the perjury angle fizzles, expect the gift probe or impeachment chatter to pick up the slack. Democrats swore in 2018 that impeachment wasn’t on their agenda either.
So when Ron Wyden finally gets his gavel and calls that first hearing to order, will anybody on the dais bring up the spy chief who told him “Not wittingly” and kept his job?
Sources:
Associated Press via Breitbart, “Senators Probing RFK Jr’s Testimony on Samoa Trip”
CNN, “Top Democrat will investigate whether RFK Jr lied to Congress”
The Washington Times, “Democrats launch probe of RFK Jr, accuse him of lying about anti-vaccine agenda on Samoa trip”
Bloomberg, “Senate Democrats Open Probe Into RFK Jr’s Measles Statements”
Office of Sen Ron Wyden, letter to Children’s Health Defense general counsel Kim Mack Rosenberg
HuffPost, “Senators Probe RFK Jr’s Samoa Trip Testimony After AP And Guardian Showed Documents That Refute It”
NBC News, “Newly obtained emails undermine RFK Jr’s testimony about 2019 Samoa trip before measles outbreak”; confirmation hearing live blog
WTOP, “Prince George’s County mask mandate expands to younger children”; “Prince George’s Co reinstitutes indoor public mask mandate”
Washington Examiner, “James Clapper avoids charges for ‘clearly erroneous’ surveillance testimony”
PolitiFact, review of James Clapper’s March 2013 testimony
The Daily Signal, coverage of lying-to-Congress referrals involving Anthony Fauci and James Clapper