The Trump administration released thousands of pages of records related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy (JFK) on March 18, almost two months after ordering the attorney general and director of national intelligence to draft a plan for their disclosure.
“We are tomorrow announcing and giving all of the Kennedy files. People have been waiting for decades for this,” he said. “We have a tremendous amount of paper. You’ve got a lot of reading.”
It’s not clear how many of the files are among the millions of pages already publicly released, and Trump did not offer further details, other than suggesting they wouldn’t be redacted.
“I said, ‘Just don’t redact. You can’t redact,’” the president said.
The order also gave them 45 days to create plans to release any remaining files on the assassinations in 1968 of former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., following up on promises Trump made on the campaign trail and at a pre-inauguration rally in Washington on Jan. 19.
This is not the first time the government has released files on JFK’s murder.
The federal government first mandated in the early 1990s that all documents related to the assassination be housed in one collection in the National Archives and Records Administration, which would be opened by 2017. It allowed the president to make exemptions.
After taking office that year, Trump said he would allow the records to be released but held back some due to what he said were national security concerns.
Additional files were released during the next administration, but President Joe Biden withheld some for similar reasons, saying it was necessary 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.”
“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 to The Epoch Times.
Researchers say there may be additional documents, roughly 500, that the president may not be able to release, including tax returns that were not subject to 2017’s disclosure order.
On Nov. 22, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested in Dallas and accused of shooting JFK after he had positioned himself from a sniper’s perch on the Texas School Book Depository’s sixth floor, where shots had rung out moments before. Nightclub owner Jack Ruby fatally shot Oswald two days later while police were transferring him to another jail.
Some of the previously released records illustrate Oswald’s Soviet connections, including CIA cables and memos that showed his visits to Soviet and Cuban embassies when he was in Mexico City weeks before the assassination. Oswald had defected to the Soviet Union before he returned home to Texas.
In one memo, Oswald called the Soviet Embassy to ask for a visa to travel across the Iron Curtain. He also visited the Cuban Embassy, seemingly hoping for a travel visa to Cuba, where he could wait for a Soviet visa. More than a month before the assassination, Oswald drove back to Texas through a border crossing point.
Another memo describes an intercepted phone call from Oswald in Mexico City. He had communicated with a KGB officer while at the Soviet Embassy in September 1963.
