US President says he will release 80,000 pages of unredacted documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, fulfilling a campaign promise to make the files public.
S President Donald Trump announced on Monday that he will release 80,000 pages of unredacted documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, fulfilling a campaign promise to make the files public.
“While we’re here, I thought it would be appropriate — we are, tomorrow, announcing and giving all of the Kennedy files. So, people have been waiting for decades for this, and I’ve instructed my people … lots of different people, [Director of National Intelligence] Tulsi Gabbard, that they must be released tomorrow,” Trump stated while touring the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., as quoted by The Hill.
The President emphasized that the documents will be released in full. “You got a lot of reading. I don’t believe we’re going to redact anything. I said, ‘just don’t redact, you can’t redact,’” he added, describing the files as “interesting.”
When asked if he had reviewed the contents, Trump responded, “I’ve heard about them,” adding, “I’m not doing summaries, you’ll write your own summary.” In January, Trump signed an executive order to declassify government records concerning the assassinations of Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
The move has the potential to address lingering questions surrounding the killings, which all occurred more than 50 years ago. Official investigations concluded that the three assassinations were carried out by lone gunmen, but those findings have long been challenged by conspiracy theories, partly fueled by the government’s continued classification of some records related to the cases.
During his first presidency, Trump allowed delays in full disclosure in 2017 and 2018, a practice continued by his successor, President Joe Biden.
In 2017, after the National Archives and Records Administration released 2,891 documents on the JFK assassination, Trump vowed he would release all documents related to the assassination.
