Trump says he will release more JFK assassination files. Here’s what we know about the declassification.
President Trump signed an executive order on Thursday to declassify any remaining files from the investigation into President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. After a release of some of the files in 2022, the National Archives and Records Administration said 97% of the roughly 5 million pages in its collection related to the JFK assassination were public.
Mr. Trump’s order also will declassify more records on the 1968 assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and former senator and attorney general Robert F. Kennedy.
What is known about the JFK assassination?
Kennedy was shot and killed while riding in his motorcade through Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, at the age of 46.
An investigation led by Chief Justice Earl Warren concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald, a former Marine and communist activist who had lived in the Soviet Union, acted alone in shooting Kennedy, but the probe has been widely criticized by academics and historians in the nearly 60 years since the assassination.
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Oswald was shot and killed in the basement of the Dallas police headquarters two days after Kennedy’s death, further fueling conspiracy theories about whether he was solely responsible.
Which JFK assassination files will Trump release?
White House officials have not yet said which or how many JFK assassination files will be released. The National Archives made public a trove of 13,173 documents related to his assassination in late 2022, shortly after then-President Biden issued an executive order authorizing their disclosure. But his administration kept thousands of other sensitive records under wraps.
Why is Trump releasing the JFK assassination files?
He said at a rally in Washington, D.C., on the eve of his inauguration that he would make the files public in order to signal a restoration of “transparency and accountability to government.”
He said his administration would “reverse the overclassification of government documents, and in the coming days, we are going to make public remaining records relating to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert Kennedy, as well as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr and other topics of great public interest.”
What JFK assassination files have already been released?
Under the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, the government was required to release all documents related to the assassination by October 2017, unless doing so would harm national security or intelligence sources, or violate certain privacy protections. Trump released thousands of documents over the course of his first term but withheld others on national security grounds.
In October 2021, Biden released nearly 1,500 more documents while delaying the release of other sensitive records until Dec. 15, 2022, saying further review was necessary to “protect against identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or the conduct of foreign relations.”
When will the JFK assassination files be released?
The timing of the release or releases has also not yet been announced.
