Trump signs executive order to release more JFK, RFK, MLK assassination files

President Trump announced that he will declassify any remaining files assassinations by President John F. Kennedy and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. He signed an executive order at the White House on Thursday.

After an aide announced that the president signed the executive action “ordering the declassification of files relating to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,” Mr. Trump. “It’s a big one, huh? A lot of people have been waiting for this for a long time—for years, for decades.”

The President instructed his aide to give the pen he used to sign the order to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., son of Robert F. Kennedy and Mr. Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. The elder Kennedy was the former attorney general, New York senator and a Democratic presidential candidate when he was killed in 1968.

After a 2022 release of some of the JFK files, the National Archives and Records Administration said 97% of the roughly 5 million pages in its collection related to the assassination were public.

The president promised during his first administration in 2017 that he would release the remaining JFK files. It included about 3,000 documents that had never been made public and 30,000 that had previously been released with redactions, but not all of the files were made public during his first term.

In 1992, Congress mandated that all assassination documents be released within 25 years.