On Thursday, President Donald Trump fulfilled another campaign promise by signing an executive order declassifying all federal government files pertaining to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Senator Robert F. Kennedy. According to the National Archives, the declassified documents represent about three percent of the total records of these incidents, but as we might note, sometimes the devil is in the details.
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By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered as follows:
Section 1. Policy and Purpose. More than 50 years after the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Federal Government has not released to the public all of its records related to those events. Their families and the American people deserve transparency and truth. It is in the national interest to finally release all records related to these assassinations without delay.
The EO sets a deadline of 15 days for the director of National Intelligence (DNI) and the U,S, attorney general to present a plan to the president for the full and complete release of all records pertaining to the assassination of President Kennedy. A deadline of 45 days was set for the records pertaining to the assassinations of Dr. King and Robert Kennedy.
Pres. Trump has announced his intent to declassify these documents earlier:
After an aide announced the president was signing the executive action “ordering the declassification of files relating to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and Dr. Reverend Martin Luthern King Jr.,” Mr. Trump said, “That’s a big one, huh? A lot of people are waiting for this for a long — for years, for decades.”
After a release of some of the JFK files in 2022, the National Archives and Records Administration said 97% of the roughly 5 million pages in its collection related to the assassination were public.
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It’s not at all unlikely that Pres. Trump’s sense of urgency in ordering this action may be the result of having survived not one, but two assassination attempts himself.
See Related: Coming Clean: Trump to Release Assassination Files on JFK, MLK Jr. and RFK
From Butler, Pennsylvania to Washington DC – Donald Trump and Destiny
He had promised a similar release in his first term, but not all records were released at that time.
The president promised during his first administration in 2017 that he would release the remaining JFK files. That included some 3,000 documents that had never been made public and 30,000 that had been previously released with redactions, but not all of the files were made public during his first term.
In 1992, Congress mandated that all assassination documents were to be released within 25 years.
We should note that it has been more than 25 years since Congress mandated this release.
At this time, it’s impossible to know what is in the three percent of records remaining. It seems unlikely there will be anything earth-shaking; many theories around the deaths of all three men abound, but in all the years since, were there any incriminating revelations in any records from the time, it seems likely they would have been disappeared by one party or another.
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Now, once the action is complete and all records released, all will be revealed – and we will be able to pore over those details. It will be interesting to see what has remained behind the wall of classification all these many years.
