President Trump announced that he would declassify any remaining files related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, as well as those connected to the assassinations of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., within 45 days.
He signed an executive order at the White House on Thursday, following an aide’s announcement that the president was signing an executive action “ordering the declassification of files relating to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and Dr. Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.”
President Trump said: “That’s a big one, huh? A lot of people have been waiting for this for a long — for years, for decades.”
The president instructed his aide to give the pen he used to sign the order to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the son of the late Robert F. Kennedy and Mr. Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.
The elder Kennedy, who was U.S. Attorney General, New York senator, and a Democratic presidential candidate, was assassinated in 1968.
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Mr. Trump has ordered the Director of National Intelligence and the Attorney General — neither of whom have been confirmed yet — to spend the next 15 days developing a plan to release the JFK files. After that, they have 45 days to create plans for the release of all the RFK and MLK files.
Following the release of some JFK files in 2022, the National Archives and Records Administration stated that 97% of the approximately 5 million pages in its collection related to the assassination were already public.
The U.S. president had pledged during his first term in 2017 to release the remaining JFK files. This included some 3,000 documents that had never been made public, as well as 30,000 previously released with redactions, though not all of the files were made public during his first term.
In 1992, the U.S. Congress mandated that all assassination-related documents be released within 25 years.
