The President Donald Trump He signed an executive order on Thursday to declassify files related to the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King.
“This is big,” Trump said as he placed his signature in the Oval Office. He asked a nearby aide to hand the sign to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services.
Trump has long vowed to make the information public. In 2017 he released a number of documents related to the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, but left some of them redacted based on the recommendations of the CIA and the FBI.
President Donald Trump signs executive orders in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Jan. 23, 2025.
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A 1992 law passed by Congress required the JFK files to be released by 2017, unless the president agreed to keep them longer.
According to the text of the White House the orderTrump has “now determined that the redaction and withholding of information about JFK” is inconsistent with the public interest and the release of these records is long overdue.
“And while no Act of Congress directs the release of information about the assassinations of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., I have decided to release all records in the possession of the Federal Government. Each of these assassinations is also in the public interest,” the order says.
President John F. Kennedy, first lady Jacqueline Kennedy, Texas Gov. John Connally and others smile at the crowds as they pass along their freeway route in Dallas, Nov. 22, 1963.
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Police stand guard on the balcony of the motel where Dr. Martin Luther King was shot, April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tenn.
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The records, however, will not be made available immediately.
The order gives the Director of National Intelligence and the Attorney General 15 days to present to Trump a plan to release the JFK records “in full and in their entirety” and 45 days to come up with a plan for the RFK and MLK documents.
The Biden administration he also released the documents In connection with the assassination of JFK – more than 13,000 of them.
At the time, the National Archives said more than 97 percent of the collection’s records, which number more than 5 million pages, were publicly available. He also said that the CIA had released 95% of its collection, and that no documents had been completely removed.
Senator Robert Francis Kennedy, flanked by his wife Ethel, gives the victory sign to a large crowd at the Ambassador Hotel on June 5, 1968.
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In 2023, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. asked the then president to release all files related to the assassination of his uncle Joe Biden.
Last year, when he ran for president as a Democrat and then as an independent before endorsing Trump, RFK Jr. conspiracy theory That the CIA was directly involved in JFK’s assassination.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. After giving his endorsement when he took the stage with Trump in August, Trump announced that he would establish a “new independent presidential commission on assassination attempts” that would be “responsible for releasing all remaining documents relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.” and other disputed facts.’
JFK was shot and killed on his way to Dallas in November 1963 by Lee Harvey Oswald.
RFK and MLK were assassinated in 1968. RFK was shot the night Sirhan Sirhan won the 1968 California Democratic presidential primary. King was assassinated in Memphis, where he was supporting a sanitation workers’ strike, by James Earl Ray.
“A lot of people have been waiting for a long time, years and decades,” Trump said Thursday as he signed the order.
