President Donald Trump on Thursday ordered plans to be drafted for the release of records related to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy (JFK), Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy (RFK), and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
The president signed an executive order on Jan. 23 directing the director of national intelligence and the attorney general to prepare a plan in 15 days for the “full and complete release” of the JFK assassination files. The deadline for the plans for the RFK and King files is 45 days.
“That’s a big one,” Trump said while signing the order in the Oval Office. “A lot of people have been waiting for this for years, for decades. And everything will be revealed.”
Trump promised at his pre-inauguration rally in Washington on Jan. 19 that he would release the remaining records on the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and King in the coming days.
The FBI accused Lee Harvey Oswald, a former U.S. Marine who had defected to the Soviet Union for a period after embracing Marxism, of assassinating JFK in 1963. Nightclub owner Jack Ruby shot and killed Oswald as authorities were moving him from the Dallas police headquarters to the county jail just two days after the assassination, stirring decades of speculation and conspiracy theories.
JFK’s assassination coincided with a period of increasing mistrust in the federal government, and many Americans still believe that Oswald was part of a larger plot to kill the president. Gallup’s most recent poll on the subject, conducted in October 2023, found that 65 percent of U.S. adults reject the theory that a lone gunman killed JFK.
Trump and former President Joe Biden previously released thousands of documents related to JFK’s killing. Roughly 99 percent of the assassination files had been released as of 2023, according to the National Archives.
However, Biden had agreed to delay the disclosure of additional records because of the necessity of protecting “against identifiable harms to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, and the conduct of foreign relations that are of such gravity that they outweigh the public interest in disclosure.”
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