Trump signs order to declassify JFK, MLK and RFK assassination files

President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order declassifying files related to the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King.

“It’s a big one,” Trump said as he signed the order in the Oval Office. He asked an aide standing nearby to give the badge to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his nominee to be secretary of health and human services.

Trump has long promised to make the information public. He released a trove of documents in 2017 related to the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy, but had some of it redacted based on recommendations from the CIA and FBI.

A 1992 law passed by Congress required the release of the JFK files by 2017 unless the president authorized their retention longer.

According to the White House text orderTrump has “now determined that the continued redaction and withholding of information” about JFK “is inconsistent with the public interest and the release of these records is long overdue.”

“And although no law of Congress mandates the release of information relating to the assassinations of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I have determined that the release of all records in the possession of the federal government relating to each of these assassinations are also in the public interest,” the order said.

However, the records will not be immediately made available.

The order gives the director of national intelligence and the attorney general 15 days to present a plan to Trump for the “full and complete” release of records for JFK and 45 days for a plan for the RFK and MLK documents.

The Biden administration also released documents related to JFK’s assassination — more than 13,000 of them.

At the time, the National Archives said more than 97% of the archival records in the collection, which contains more than 5 million pages, were publicly available. The CIA also said that 95% of its collection had been released and that no documents remained completely redacted.

In 2023, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called for then-President Joe Biden to release all the files related to his uncle’s assassination.

Last year, when he ran for president first as a Democrat and then as an independent before endorsing Trump, RFK Jr. floated a conspiracy theory that the CIA was directly involved in the assassination of JFK.

When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took the stage with Trump in August after giving his endorsement, Trump announced that he would create “a new independent presidential commission on attempted assassinations” tasked with releasing “all remaining documents relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy” . and other relevant events.”

JFK was shot and killed in November 1963 during a visit to Dallas at the hands of Lee Harvey Oswald.

RFK and MLK were killed in 1968. RFK was shot the night he won the California Democratic presidential primary in 1968 by Sirhan Sirhan. King was killed in Memphis, where he was supporting a strike for sanitation workers, by James Earl Ray.

“A lot of people have been waiting for this for a long time — for years and decades,” Trump said when he signed the order Thursday.