Trump also ordered the release of files on the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday, releasing additional government files associated with the assassinations of former President John F. Kennedy (JFK), former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy (RFK), and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
“That’s a big one,” Trump said while signing the order at the Oval Office. “A lot of people have been waitingforthisforyears,fordecades. 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 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 Oswald was part of a larger plot to kill the president. Gallup’s most recent poll, 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 death. Roughly 99 percent of the assassination files have been released as of 2023, according to the National Archives.
However, Biden had agreed to delay the disclosure of additional records, stating 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.”
JFK’s nephew, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK Jr.), who Trump nominated to lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, launched a petition in 2023 on the 60th anniversary of the assassination demanding the Biden administration release all remaining government records on his uncle’s murder.
By Jacob Burg
