WASHINGTON ― President Donald Trump said his administration on Tuesday will release all the government’s classified files on the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, making what he said will be about 80,000 pages of unredacted records available to the public for the first time.
“People have been waiting for decades for this,” Trump said, announcing the upcoming release of the Kennedy files during a Monday visit to the John F. Kennedy Center of the Performing Arts, which he’s taken over as board chairman.
“We have a tremendous amount of paper. You’ve got a lot of reading. I don’t believe we’re going to redact anything,” Trump said.
The release of the files comes after Trump signed a day one executive order in January aimed at fully releasing government documents related to the assassinations of Kennedy, his brother and presidential candidate Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, D-N.Y., and civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.
John F. Kennedy was shot and killed on Nov. 22, 1963 while riding in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas. His assassination has long been the subject of conspiracies after Lee Harvey Oswald, the Marine veteran identified as Kennedy’s assassin, was shot and killed days later.
While millions of government records related to the Kennedy assassination have been previously released, some information remains classified and redacted. Trump said he instructed his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, to oversee the release of he remaining files.
A federal law passed in 1992 required the Kennedy assassination records to be fully released by Oct. 26, 2017 unless the president at the time determined their release would cause “identifiable harm” to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations of such gravity that it “outweighs the public interest in disclosure.”
Trump was president when the 2017 deadline arrived. He ordered the release of nearly 2,900 records, but kept others secret because of concerns by the CIA and FBI that their release could hurt national security.
Former President Joe Biden acted in 2021, 2022 and 2023 to give agencies more time to review the records.
The documents released in 2017 included details on the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Central Intelligence Agency investigations into Oswald and information on covert Cold War operations. The FBI in February announced it discovered an additional 2,400 new records related to the Kennedy assassination.
“It’s going to be very interesting,” Trump told reporters of Tuesday’s release. “It’s a lot of stuff, and you’ll make your own determination.”
Reach Joey Garrison on X @joeygarrison.
