Trump orders release of JFK, MLK assassination documents
US President Donald Trump has ordered the declassification of documents related to three of the most important assassinations in US history: the killings of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King.
“A lot of people have been waiting for this, for a long time, for decades,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday. “Everything will be revealed.”
President John F. Kennedy was killed in 1963. His brother, Robert F. Kennedy, was assassinated while running for president in 1968, just two months after King, America’s most famous civil rights leader, was murdered in Memphis, Tennessee.
Many documents related to the investigation have been released in the years since, but thousands remain redacted, particularly those related to Kennedy.
Trump asked that the pen he used to sign the order be given to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Kennedy’s son, nephew and the president’s nominee for health secretary.
John F. Kennedy was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas. But alternative conspiracy theories about the involvement of government agents, the Mafia and various other nefarious figures have long dogged the case.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had long expressed doubts about the official version of the assassinations of his uncle and his father.
Trump pledged to declassify all of Kennedy’s documents during his first term, but walked back his pledge after CIA and FBI officials convinced him to keep some documents secret. Today’s executive order states that continued secrecy is “not in the public interest.”
A 1992 law requires confidential documents to be made public within 25 years. Trump didn’t quite meet the deadline, and neither did former President Joe Biden when it came time to release more documents in 2022. Thousands of the millions of documents related to the assassination have yet to be fully disclosed.
In recent years, new details have emerged from document releases, including about CIA surveillance of Oswald.
