President Trump announced that a significant number of pages pertaining to the JFK assassination would be made public on Tuesday.
“People have been anticipating this for decades,” the president remarked regarding the release of documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Speaking at the Kennedy Center on Monday, Mr. Trump further stated that he did not anticipate any redactions in the material, which amounts to “approximately 80,000 pages.”
“I committed to this during the campaign, and I intend to keep my promise,” the president noted about the forthcoming release.
Recently, the FBI indicated that it had uncovered around 2,400 records connected to the assassination during a search prompted by Mr. Trump’s executive order to declassify files related to the 1963 murder.
The bureau reported that the documents, which have been cataloged and digitized, “had not previously been recognized as linked to the JFK assassination case file.” In February, the FBI began transferring these records to the National Archives and Records Administration as part of the ongoing declassification efforts. The bureau did not disclose the contents of the records.
In his initial week of presidency, Mr. Trump enacted an executive order calling for the declassification of files pertaining not only to Kennedy’s assassination but also to those related to the killings of his brother, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.
This order mandated that the director of national intelligence and the attorney general present a plan to the president within 15 days for the “full and complete release of records” concerning Kennedy’s assassination.
In 1992, Congress passed the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, which stipulated that all materials associated with the assassination be consolidated within the National Archives and made available to the public. The law allowed federal agencies 25 years to process and disclose the documents, with some exceptions. The National Archives currently houses over 5 million pages of records in this collection.
Over the past thirty years, the National Archives has progressively provided the public access to materials related to Kennedy’s assassination, with the latest release occurring in August 2023. As of December 2022, the agency reported that more than 97% of the records in its Kennedy collection are accessible to the American public.
