Trump vows to release secret files on major US assassinations ‘in days’ after decades of conspiracy theories
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Donald Trump has pledged to release top secret files on some of the most notorious political assassinations in American history as soon as he takes office.
The president-elect, who will become the first US president since Grover Cleveland to return to the White House for a non-consecutive second term when he is inaugurated at the Capitol rotunda on Monday, made the promise to his supporters at a “Make America Great Again Victory Rally” at Washington DC’s Capital One Arena on Sunday.
“In the coming days, we are going to make public remaining records related to the assassinations of President John F Kennedy, his brother Robert F Kennedy, as well as Dr Martin Luther King Jr and other topics of great public interest,” Trump told the crowd in his final speech before becoming America’s 47th commander-in-chief, repeating a vow he made on the campaign trail last year.
During his first year in the Oval Office, Trump also released a batch of documents related to JFK’s slaying in Dallas, Texas, on November 22 1963.
But he ultimately bowed to pressure from the CIA and FBI not to go further, keeping a significant portion of the documents concerned under wraps, citing national security fears as the basis for his decision.
On Sunday Trump did not specify what files he intends to release this time around or go so far as to promise a blanket declassification.
The murders of some of the most consequential public figures of the 20th century in the 1960s have long attracted intense fascination and conspiracy theories, with JFK’s assassination in particular a fixation for many inclined to suspect that gunman Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone.
Trump himself has spread unfounded claims related to the killing of the 35th president, shot dead by sniper’s bullets as his motorcade passed through the southern city’s Dealey Plaza, suggesting – without evidence – as he sought the Republican presidential nomination in 2016 that Raphael Cruz, the father of his then-rival, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, had been involved in the alleged plot to assassinate Kennedy.
The documents released by Trump in October 2017 offered details on the way intelligence services operated at the time and included CIA cables and memos discussing visits by Oswald to the Soviet and Cuban embassies during a trip to Mexico City just weeks before he opened fire from the upper floors of the Texas School Book Depository.
At this point, only a few thousand of the millions of governmental records related to the first Kennedy assassination have yet to be published and those who have studied the records released thus far say that even if the remaining files are declassified, the public should not anticipate earth-shattering revelations.
“Anybody waiting for a smoking gun that’s going to turn this case upside down will be sorely disappointed,” said Gerald Posner, author of Case Closed, in November.
Posner’s book concludes that Oswald was solely responsible after all, just as the Warren Commission originally concluded.
He estimates that there are still about 3,000 to 4,000 documents in the collection that have not yet been fully released.
There are about 500 documents that have been completely withheld, according to Posner, and those include Oswald’s tax returns, as well as those of Jack Ruby, the nightclub owner who in turn killed Oswald.
Those files, the US National Archives says on its website, were not subject to the 2017 disclosure requirement.
Of those documents, some are still completely redacted while others just have small redactions, like someone’s Social Security number.
The files on the 1968 killing of the dead man’s brother and possible successor Robert F Kennedy will be of particular interest to the latter’s son, Robert F Kennedy Jr, Trump’s nominee to be America’s next secretary of health and human services.
RFK Jr is no stranger to feverish speculation himself and has met with the man convicted of his father’s shooting, Sirhan Sirhan, in prison in the past in pursuit of the truth about that murder, saying that he believes multiple gunmen were really responsible.
