The FBI has discovered roughly 2,400 new records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy (JFK), pursuant to a recent file search following President Donald Trump’s recent executive order.
“The search resulted in approximately 2,400 newly inventoried and digitized records that were previously unrecognized as related to the JFK assassination case file,” the bureau wrote in its statement.
While the FBI did not offer details on what the new files contain, the bureau is making “appropriate notifications of the newly discovered documents” and said the documents will be transferred to the National Archives and Records Administration for “inclusion in the ongoing declassification process.”
The FBI opened its Central Records Complex in 2020, allowing the bureau to collect archived paper files from dozens of field offices nationwide to digitize and store them. The 256,000-square-foot complex is located in Winchester, Virginia.
Biden moved to delay the disclosure of additional records, citing the need to protect “against identifiable harms to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, and the conduct of foreign relations that are of such gravity that they outweigh the public interest in disclosure.”
In his executive order, Trump disagreed with Biden and said redacting or withholding the remaining files is “not consistent with the public interest” and that the “release of these records is long overdue.”
The president had promised at a pre-inauguration rally in Washington on Jan. 19 that he would release the remaining records on the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and King in the coming days.
The FBI accused Lee Harvey Oswald, a former U.S. Marine, of assassinating JFK in 1963. Nightclub owner Jack Ruby shot and killed Oswald as authorities were moving him from the Dallas police headquarters to the county jail just two days after the assassination, stirring decades of speculation and conspiracy theories.
