Trump orders release of JFK, MLK assassination documents

US President Donald Trump has ordered the documents related to three of the most consequential assassinations in US history – the assassinations of John F Kennedy, Robert F Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr – to be declassified.

“A lot of people have been waiting for this for a long time, for decades,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday. “All will be revealed.”

President John F Kennedy was killed in 1963. His brother Robert F Kennedy was assassinated while running for president in 1968, just two months after King, America’s most famous civil rights leader, was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee.

Many of the documents related to the investigations have been released in the years since, although thousands still remain redacted, particularly those related to JFK.

Trump asked for the pen he used to sign the order to be given to Robert F Kennedy Jr, who is RFK’s son, JFK’s nephew and the president’s nominee for health secretary.

John F Kennedy was killed in Dallas by Lee Harvey Oswald. But alternative conspiracy theories involving government agents, the Mafia and all sorts of other nefarious characters have long taken the case.

RFK Jr has long had nagging doubts about the official accounts of his uncle’s murder, as well as his father RFK’s.

Trump promised to declassify all JFK files during his first term, but reneged on his promise after CIA and FBI officials persuaded him to keep some files secret. Today’s executive order says continued secrecy is “not consistent with the public interest.”

A 1992 law required the classified files to be released within 25 years. Trump didn’t quite meet the deadline, and neither did former President Joe Biden when he released more documents in 2022. A few thousand — out of millions related to the assassination — have yet to be fully disclosed.

In recent years, some new details have come out of document releases, including about the CIA’s surveillance of Oswald.