Two Democratic senators have opened an investigation into whether Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told Congress the truth about his 2019 trip to Samoa. Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, and Senator Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland sent a letter on Wednesday to Children's Health Defense — the advocacy group Kennedy chaired until December 2024 — announcing an investigation into evidence that he "unlawfully lied to Congress on multiple occasions."
The senators asked Children's Health Defense for all documents related to Kennedy's travel to Samoa, including travel by the group's other employees and associates and all communications with Samoan government officials. The request also covers records of Kennedy's 2024 presidential campaign and his Senate confirmation process, and all communications between the group and federal government officials since President Donald Trump began his second term in January 2025. The senators gave the group a deadline of December 4 to comply. The letter is a formal request for records — it does not carry the legal force of a subpoena.
At his confirmation hearings in January 2025, Kennedy repeatedly told senators that his June 2019 visit to Samoa had "nothing to do with vaccines." He said he went to introduce a medical informatics system to digitize Samoa's health records and improve the delivery of care.
Reporting by the Associated Press and The Guardian, published in August from letters obtained through an open-records lawsuit brought by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, tells a different story about the planning. In a January 2019 letter to Samoa's then prime minister, Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi, sent on Children's Health Defense letterhead months before the trip, Kennedy said he wanted to "conduct detailed health informatics assessment in Samoa of what happened with your MMR vaccines" — using the words vaccine or vaccination eight times in the letter. Months after the June 2019 visit, a measles outbreak swept Samoa and killed 83 people, most of them children under five. Samoa's vaccination program had been suspended for about ten months before the outbreak, after two infants died in 2018 from MMR doses that had been wrongly prepared.
"We intend to hold Secretary Kennedy accountable for the grave harm he has caused to vulnerable children," Wyden and Alsobrooks wrote. "We also intend to hold him accountable for any false statements made to Congress, a crime that undermines the Senate's ability to fulfill its constitutional duties." Wyden has said he will press for a criminal referral to the Justice Department over the testimony, and Alsobrooks has publicly demanded that Kennedy resign or be fired. Those are the senators' allegations and demands — the investigation they have opened is a request for evidence, not a finding that Kennedy broke the law.
The Department of Health and Human Services has maintained that the Samoa visit "was unrelated to vaccines." In response to an inquiry about the letters in August, the department said "any claim or insinuation based on these letters that Secretary Kennedy lied under oath or to Congress is not only false but outright defamatory." Kennedy was not under oath during his confirmation hearings; knowingly giving material false testimony to Congress is a crime whether a witness is sworn or not, though it is rarely prosecuted. Spokespeople for the department and for Children's Health Defense did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the new investigation on Thursday.
For American families, what is at stake is who runs the nation's vaccine policy, and whether the Senate was told the truth before it confirmed him. Wyden is expected to chair the Finance Committee, which oversees Kennedy's department, when Democrats take control of the Senate in January, and Alsobrooks serves on the Senate health committee, so the fight over the records is set to run alongside the department's own decisions on measles and childhood vaccination. The senators point to the backdrop: the United States is experiencing its worst measles outbreak in decades, with more than 5,000 cases nationwide and eight deaths.
The same senators on Wednesday also announced a separate investigation into hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of gifts reportedly given to Kennedy last year by a donor and former employee.
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