President Donald Trump on Monday announced that his administration will release about 80,000 pages of unredacted documents related to the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Speaking to reporters during a visit to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Trump said: “While we’re here, I thought it would be appropriate—we are, tomorrow, announcing and giving all of the Kennedy files.”
The files are the trove of government documents related to the fatal shooting of Kennedy as his motorcade passed in front of the Texas School Book Depository building in downtown Dallas, where assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was stationed on the sixth floor, on November 22, 1963. Oswald was fatally shot by nightclub owner Jack Ruby during a jail transfer two days later.
Why It Matters
On the campaign trail, Trump had promised to declassify the remaining government documents about Kennedy’s assassination. He made a similar pledge to release the remaining files during his first term in office, but ultimately withheld some documents after appeals from the FBI and CIA about potential national security risks.
While the FBI and the Warren Commission, created to investigate the 1963 assassination, both concluded it was carried out by Oswald who acted alone, conspiracies about it have persisted in the decades since. A 2023 Gallup poll found that 65 percent of Americans believe Oswald did not act alone.
What to Know
The federal government in the early 1990s mandated that all assassination-related documents be housed in a collection in the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). The collection was required to be opened in 2017, barring exemptions designated by the president.
The collection consists of more than 6 million pages of assassination-related records, the vast majority of which have been declassified and are “already available to the public either in-person or online,” according to NARA’s website.
Newsweek contacted NARA and the White House for comment via email.
Trump signed an executive order shortly after returning to office in January that ordered the release of the thousands of still-classified government documents about the assassinations of Kennedy, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy.
The order directed the director of national intelligence and the attorney general to develop a plan within 15 days for the “full and complete release of records relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy” and within 45 days for the records relating to the other two cases.
The FBI in February announced that it had conducted a new records check following Trump’s order and discovered around 2,400 recently inventoried and digitized documents that are related to Kennedy’s assassination and had not previously been linked to it.
Trump told reporters on Monday that the documents being released would not be redacted.
“I don’t believe we’re going to redact anything. I said, ‘just don’t redact, you can’t redact,'” he said.
Asked if he had seen the contents of the documents, Trump said he has “heard about them” and that “it’s going to be very interesting.”
He added: “It’s approximately 80,000 pages so it’s a lot of stuff and you’ll make your own determination.”
What People Are Saying
Trump told reporters on Monday: “They’ve been waiting for that for decades and I said during the campaign I’d do it, and I’m a man of my word.”
The FBI told Newsweek in February: “The FBI has made the appropriate notifications of the newly discovered documents and is working to transfer them to the National Archives and Records Administration for inclusion in the ongoing declassification process.”
Gerald Posner, an investigative journalist and author of Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK, told Newsweek in January: “By keeping files for over 60 years, it’s natural that the general public would think, well, they must be keeping files because they have something to hide.”
But he concluded: “Lee Harvey Oswald was, in fact, the assassin, did kill the president, and that there was not a conspiracy behind it.”
Jefferson Morley, an author and former Washington Post journalist, and editor of the blog JFKFacts, told Newsweek that the unreleased files could undermine the lone gunman theory.
He said: “The CIA has classified the details of 44 documents which concern a secret CIA operation (code name AMSPELL) that targeted the leftist Fair Play for Cuba Committee (and Lee Harvey Oswald) for propaganda and political action purposes in the months before JFK was killed.”
What’s Next
Trump said the files would be released on Tuesday.
NARA’s website states that the agency “is ready to receive and process any further declassification decisions made by President Trump or by other agencies of the United States Government.
“As determinations are made and records are digitized, the National Archives will post the records online, at this webpage, on a rolling basis.”
Read the full article here
