Trump says he’s ordered declassification of remaining JFK assassination records
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Trump says ‘everything will be revealed’ about the 1963 killing of the late president and the murder of his brother five years later. President Donald Trump on Thursday said he’s ordering the declassification and release of all remaining records relating to the assassinations of President John F Kennedy, his brother and New York Senator Robert F Kennedy Sr, and the Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr.
Trump made the announcement during an impromptu signing ceremony in the Oval Office after being handed the order to sign by White House Staff Secretary Will Scharf. After Scharf told him what he was signing, the president replied: “That’s a big one., huh?”.
“A lot of people are waiting for this for a long time, for years, for decades,” he continued before adding that “everything will be revealed” about the assassinations, all three of which have been the subject of conspiracy theories in the decades since they occurred.
A George HW Bush-era law had required the release of all JFK assassination records in October 2017, and during Trump’s first term numerous records were indeed declassified and made public, but many remained hidden from view for years afterwards. Trump’s predecessor, former president Joe Biden, also signed a 2021 presidential memorandum laying out a series of deadlines for declassification releasing records related to the 35th president’s shooting by former US Marine Lee Harvey Oswald, and cited the Covid-19 pandemic’s effect on agencies’ declassification work and the need “to protect against identifiable harm to the military defence, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or the conduct of foreign relations that is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in immediate disclosure.”.
