Donald Trump has ordered the release of thousands of classified governmental documents about the 1963 assassination of John F Kennedy, which has fueled conspiracy theories for decades.
The executive order the president signed on Thursday also aims to declassify the remaining federal records relating to the assassinations of Robert F Kennedy and the Rev Martin Luther King Jr. The order is among a flurry of executive actions Trump has quickly taken the first week of his second term.
“More than 50 years after the assassinations of President John F Kennedy, Senator Robert F Kennedy, and the Rev Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, the federal government has not released to the public all of its records related to those events,” the executive order stated.
“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,” it added.
Speaking to reporters, Trump said, “everything will be revealed.”
“That’s a big one,” he added as he signed the order.
Trump had promised during his re-election campaign to make public the last batches of still-classified documents surrounding Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, which has transfixed people for decades. He made a similar pledge during his first term, but ultimately heeded appeals from the CIA and FBI to withhold some documents.
Trump has nominated Kennedy’s nephew, Robert F Kennedy Jr, to be the health secretary in his new administration. Kennedy, whose father, Robert F Kennedy, was assassinated in 1968 while running for president, has said he is not convinced that a lone gunman was solely responsible for the assassination of his uncle, John F Kennedy, in 1963.
The order directs the director of national intelligence and the attorney general to develop a plan within 15 days to declassify the remaining John F Kennedy records, and within 45 days for the other two cases. It was not clear when the records would actually be released.
Trump handed the pen used to sign the order to an aide and directed it to be given to Robert F Kennedy Jr.
Speaking to NBC News, Kennedy Jr said that he was “grateful to president Trump,” adding: “I think it’s a great move, because they need to have more transparency in our government, and he’s keeping his promise to have the government tell the truth to the American people about everything.”
Meanwhile, Jack Schlossberg, the grandson of Kennedy, took to X to condemn Trump’s latest executive order as a “political prop”.
“The truth is a lot sadder than the myth – a tragedy that didn’t need to happen. Not part of an inevitable grand scheme. Declassification is using JFK as a political prop, when he’s not here to punch back. There’s nothing heroic about it,” Schlossberg said.
Only a few thousand of the millions of governmental records related to the assassination of John F Kennedy have yet to be fully declassified. And while many who have studied what has been released so far say the public should not anticipate any earth-shattering revelations, there is still an intense interest in details related to the assassination and the events surrounding it.
“There’s always the possibility that something would slip through that would be the tiny tip of a much larger iceberg that would be revealing,” said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics and author of The Kennedy Half-Century. “That’s what researchers look for. Now, odds are you won’t find that but it is possible that it’s there.”
Kennedy was fatally shot in downtown Dallas on 22 November 1963 as his motorcade passed in front of the Texas School Book Depository building, where the 24-year-old assassin Lee Harvey Oswald had positioned himself in a sniper’s perch on the sixth floor. Two days after Kennedy was killed, the 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 more than 5m records was required to be opened by 2017, barring any exemptions designated by the president.
During his first term, Trump boasted that he would allow the release of all of the remaining records on the president’s 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 Joe Biden, some still remain unseen.
Sabato, who trains student researchers to comb through the documents, said most researchers agree that “roughly” 3,000 records have not yet been released, either in whole or in part, and many of those originated with the CIA.
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.
There are still some documents in the collection, though, that researchers do not believe the president would be able to release. About 500 documents, including tax returns, were not subject to the 2017 disclosure requirement. And, researchers note, documents have also been destroyed over the decades.
