When Will the Declassified JFK Files Be Released Publicly?
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Donald Trump has delivered on one of his campaign pledges for the conspiratorial-minded, signing an executive order on January 23 to release the remaining classified files related to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. “The continued redaction and withholding of information from records pertaining to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy is not consistent with the public interest and the release of these records is long overdue,” the order reads. Trump was more succinct as he signed the order in Sharpie. “Everything will be revealed,” he said. Polls have long shown that a majority of Americans do not believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in Kennedy’s death.
Trump’s order — which also requires the release of documents related to the Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. assassinations — provides a time frame and guidelines for the declassification process. But how much about the assassination is really left in the cabinets of the intelligence community? Below is everything we know about the JFK files and how we got here.
The executive order demands that the attorney general and director of national intelligence “present a plan within 15 days for the full and complete release” of the JFK assassination records. Next, they will “immediately review” the records related to the RFK and MLK Jr. assassinations and present a plan for their release within 45 days.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that we will see these documents in a matter of weeks. The timeline is for the Justice Department and director of national intelligence to issue a plan. The actual process could take far longer. For one, both departments have a lot of other priorities under the new president.
Experts also say that if a total release of JFK documents is actually coming, it will take a long time for the intelligence community to complete a review process. Larry Scnhapf, an attorney who has sued the government to release JFK files, told ABC News that “if they’re going to do a substantive [document by document] review, then it’s going to be a while before the records are released.”
In 1992, after Oliver Stone’s conspiratorial JFK revived the public’s and lawmakers’ interest in the assassination, Congress passed the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, which required the National Archives and Records Administration to collect all files related to the assassination and multiple investigations into it with a plan to release previously withheld documents in 2017.
But as the deadline loomed during Trump’s first term, the intelligence community lobbied him to stall, claiming it needed more time to complete reviews. Trump then essentially kicked the can to his successor. Biden ordered the release of 13,000 documents in 2022 before issuing a “final certification” in 2023, in which he released thousands more documents but left an estimated 4,000 withheld.
Since the JFK records act was passed in 1992, 320,000 documents have been reviewed and 99 percent of those have been released, per NARA. But the Biden administration left 2,140 documents fully or partially redacted. Another 2,500 docs were withheld for other reasons, like court-ordered seals of restrictions from individuals who donated their papers. Some names of investigators and their processes have been withheld over the years. Burt Griffin, an assistant counsel on the Warren Commission, told Time that those names were withheld because “people were doing illegal things,” like wiretapping mafia leaders. “We knew they were doing things that were illegal,” he said. “We didn’t know the details of how they were doing it.”
Historians, for the most part, do not expect any bombshells from the remaining papers. But authors who study the JFK assassination expect that will not stop those who believe there were multiple gunmen from further speculation.
The Warren Commission, the FBI, and various governmental probes concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. But in 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations determined there was a “high probability” that two gunmen fired at JFK. “The Committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy,” the lawmakers wrote in their findings.
Like Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. campaigned on a promise to release all files related to the assassinations of his uncle and father. Naturally, he supports his boss’s decision. “I think it’s a great move because they need to have more transparency in our government and he’s keeping his promise to have the government tell the truth to the American people about everything,” Kennedy told reporters on the day the order was announced.
In a statement, Kennedy added that the decision was a step against the government secrecy that he believes has undermined the country for decades. “The 60-year strategy of lies and secrecy, disinformation, censorship, and defamation employed by Intel officials to obscure and suppress troubling facts about JFK’s assassination has provided the playbook for a series of subsequent crises — the MLK and RFK assassinations, Vietnam, 9/11, the Iraq war and COVID — that have each accelerated the subversion of our exemplary democracy by the Military/Medical Industrial Complex and pushed us further down the road toward totalitarianism,” he wrote in a post on X.
Kennedy said in 2023 that he believes that there is “overwhelming evidence that the CIA was involved in his murder. I think it’s beyond a reasonable doubt at this point.”
