DALLAS (AP) — President Donald Trump has ordered the release of thousands of classified governmental documents about the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which has fueled conspiracy theories for decades.
The executive order Trump signed Thursday also aims to declassify the remaining federal records relating to the assassinations of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.
Speaking to reporters, Trump said, “everything will be revealed.”
Trump had promised during his reelection campaign to make public the last batches of still-classified documents surrounding President Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, which has transfixed people for decades. He made a similar pledge during his first term, but ultimately bended to appeals from the CIA and FBI to keep some documents withheld.
Trump has nominated JFK’s nephew, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to be the health secretary in his new administration. RFK Jr., whose father was assassinated in 1968 while running for president, has said he isn’t convinced that a lone gunman was solely responsible for the assassination of his uncle in 1963.
Only a few thousand of the millions of governmental records related to the assassination of President Kennedy have yet to be fully declassified. And while many who have studied what’s been released so far say the public shouldn’t anticipate any earth-shattering revelations, there is still an intense interest in details related to the assassination and the events surrounding it.
John F. Kennedy was fatally shot in downtown Dallas on November 22, 1963, as his motorcade passed in front of the Texas School Book Depository building, where assassin Lee Harvey Oswald had positioned himself from a sniper’s perch on the sixth floor. Two days after Kennedy was killed, nightclub owner Jack Ruby fatally shot Oswald during a jail transfer.
In the early 1990s, the federal government mandated that all assassination-related documents be housed in a single collection in the National Archives and Records Administration. The collection of over 5 million records was required to be opened by 2017, barring any exemptions designated by the president.
During his first term, Trump boasted that he’d allow the release of all of the remaining records on the assassination but ended up holding some back because of what he called the potential harm to national security.
And while files have continued to be released under President Joe Biden, some still remain unseen.
The documents released over the last several years offer details on the way intelligence services operated at the time, and include CIA cables and memos discussing visits by Oswald to the Soviet and Cuban embassies during a trip to Mexico City just weeks before the assassination. The former Marine had previously defected to the Soviet Union before returning home to Texas.
By JAMIE STENGLE, The Associated Press
About Jim McCabe
