Tourists point from a window at the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas in 2003. The museum is the former Texas Schoolbook Depository, where Lee Harvey Oswald is said to have fired his rifle in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963. President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order intended to bring the release of all government records related to the assassinations of Kennedy, his brother, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Thursday ordered the nation’s security agencies to develop plans to release all government records related to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Trump made a similar vow to disclose remaining documents related to the killing of President Kennedy during his first term, but he ultimately agreed to some redactions at the behest of intelligence agencies to protect sensitive information such as the names of CIA assets, intelligence-gathering methods and partnerships.
Since returning to office, Trump has said he no longer considered such redactions to be valid and wanted everything related to the president’s assassination to be released. He also ordered agencies to develop plans to release papers related to the killings of Robert Kennedy and King, which were not covered by a previous disclosure law focused on President Kennedy.
“I have now determined that the continued redaction and withholding of information from records pertaining to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy is not consistent with the public interest and the release of these records is long overdue,” Trump said in an executive order. He added: “I have determined that the release of all records” related to the deaths of Robert Kennedy and King “is also in the public interest.”
Trump has lon-g indulged in conspiracy theories about the killing of President Kennedy in November 1963, even alleging that the father of Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, one of his Republican primary rivals in 2016, had associated with the assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. Testimony at Trump’s hush money trial last year revealed how the National Enquirer, which was helping
Trump at the time, had manufactured that allegation using doctored photos to smear Cruz.
Trump now has an adviser in Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who likewise subscribes to conspiracy theories about the killing of the president, his uncle, in Dallas. Kennedy Jr., who endorsed Trump last year and has now been nominated for health secretary, has said that “there’s overwhelming evidence that the CIA was involved in his murder” and “it’s beyond a reasonable doubt at this point.”
Kennedy Jr., who was 14 when his father was shot at a Los Angeles hotel in June 1968 and died in a hospital the next day, has similarly questioned the official account of that assassination. He has said that he believed there was a second gunman involved and that the convicted assassin, Sirhan B. Sirhan, was not the one who killed his father.
The younger Kennedy has raised the subject of releasing assassination papers related to his family repeatedly with people close to Trump, according to one such person who has listened to him expound on the subject. It was not immediately clear why Trump added the April 1968 assassination of King to the disclosure order.
A 1992 law mandated that documents related to the President Kennedy assassination, except those that could do “identifiable harm” to national security that outweighed the value of disclosure, be released within 25 years.
When the deadline arrived in 2017, Trump released some papers but granted more time to complete the work in deference to the intelligence agencies. In 2023, President Joe Biden released still more documents and declared it the “final certification” under the law.
Of roughly 320,000 documents reviewed since the law passed, 99% have been disclosed, according to the National Archives and Records Administration. But when Biden made his certification, 2,140 documents remained fully or partially withheld. Another 2,502 documents remained withheld for reasons outside the president’s purview, including court-ordered seals, grand jury secrecy rules, tax privacy limits and restrictions imposed by people who donated papers. A final 42 papers were held back for a mix of reasons.
In his order Thursday, Trump directed his attorney general and director of national intelligence to give him a plan within 15 days “for the full and complete release of records relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.” He gave those same officials 45 days to come up with a plan “for the full and complete release” of papers related to the killings of Robert Kennedy and King.