President Donald Trump on Thursday ordered plans to be drafted for the release of records related to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy (JFK), Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy (RFK), and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
“That’s a big one,” Trump said while signing the order in the Oval Office. “A lot of people have been waiting for this for years, for decades. And everything will be revealed.”
Trump promised at his 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 who had defected to the Soviet Union for a period after embracing Marxism, 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.
However, Biden had agreed to delay the disclosure of additional records because of the necessity of protecting “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.”
JFK’s nephew, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK Jr.), whom Trump has nominated to lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, launched a petition in 2023 on the 60th anniversary of the assassination demanding that the Biden administration release all remaining government records on his uncle’s murder.
RFK Jr. was just 9 years old when his uncle was assassinated in 1963, and he was 14 when his father was assassinated during the 1968 Democratic presidential primaries.
“The 1992 Kennedy Records Assassination Act mandated the release of all records related to the JFK assassination by 2017. Trump refused to do it. Biden refused to do it. What is so embarrassing that they’re afraid to show the American public 60 years later?” RFK Jr. wrote in a statement on his website in 2023.
“Trust in government is at an all-time low. Releasing the full, unredacted historical records will help to restore that trust.”
Biden had moved to redact some of the last remaining JFK assassination files, but Trump’s order states that this action is “not consistent with the public interest and the release of these records is long overdue.”
“Their families and the American people deserve transparency and truth. It is in the national interest to finally release all records related to these assassinations without delay,” the order reads.
