US President Donald Trump has ordered the documents related to three of the most consequential assassinations in US history – the killings of John F Kennedy, Robert F Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr – to be declassified.
“A lot of people are waiting for this, for long, for, for decades,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday. “Everything will be revealed.”
President John F Kennedy was killed in 1963. His brother Robert F Kennedy was assassinated while running for president in 1968, just two months after King, America’s most famous civil rights leader, was murdered in Memphis, Tennessee.
Many of the documents related to the investigations have been released in the years since, although thousands still remain redacted, particularly related to JFK.
Trump asked for the pen he used to sign the order to be given to Robert F Kennedy Jr, who is RFK’s son, JFK’s nephew and the president’s nominee for health secretary.
John F Kennedy was killed in Dallas by Lee Harvey Oswald. But alternative conspiracy theories about the involvement of government agents, the mafia and all sorts of other nefarious characters have long dogged the case.
RFK Jr has long cast doubt on the official narratives about his uncle’s assassination as well as that of his father RFK.
Trump promised to declassify all of the JFK files in his first term, but held back on his promise after CIA and FBI officials persuaded him to keep some files secret. Today’s executive order states that continued secrecy “is not consistent with the public interest”.
A 1992 law required the classified files to be released within 25 years. Trump didn’t quite meet the deadline, and neither did former President Joe Biden when he released more documents in 2022. A few thousand – out of millions related to the assassination – have yet to be fully revealed.
In recent years there have been some new details that have come out of document releases, including about the CIA’s monitoring of Oswald.
