‘People have been waiting for decades for this,’ the president said. ‘We have a tremendous amount of paper.’
The Trump administration released thousands of pages of records related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy (JFK) on March 18, almost two months after ordering the attorney general and director of national intelligence to draft a plan for their disclosure.
More than 1,100 files, with multiple pages per file in many instances, were dropped on the National Archives website at approximately 7 p.m. EST. The Epoch Times is reviewing the files, which include scanned copies of previously classified documents.
President Donald Trump told reporters on Monday during a tour of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington that his administration would soon release roughly 80,000 pages of JFK assassination files.
“We are tomorrow announcing and giving all of the Kennedy files. People have been waiting for decades for this,” he said. “We have a tremendous amount of paper. You’ve got a lot of reading.”
It’s not clear how many of the files are among the millions of pages already publicly released, and Trump did not offer further details, other than suggesting they wouldn’t be redacted.
“I said, ‘Just don’t redact. You can’t redact,’” the president said.
Trump signed an executive order on Jan. 23 giving Attorney General Pam Bondi and Director of Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard 15 days to prepare a plan for the “full and complete release” of any remaining JFK assassination files.
The order also gave them 45 days to create plans to release any remaining files on the assassinations in 1968 of former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., following up on promises Trump made on the campaign trail and at a pre-inauguration rally in Washington on Jan. 19.
This is not the first time the government has released files on JFK’s murder.
The federal government first mandated in the early 1990s that all documents related to the assassination be housed in one collection in the National Archives and Records Administration, which would be opened by 2017. It allowed the president to make exemptions.
After taking office that year, Trump said he would allow the records to be released but held back some due to what he said were national security concerns.
By Jacob Burg
Travis Gillmore and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
