Trump orders release of last files on assassinations of JFK, RFK and MLK

The subject of enduring conspiracy theories for decades has been the release and declassification of all remaining files relating to the assassination of former US President John F. Kennedy.

The last remaining documents from Robert F. Kennedy, JFK’s younger brother, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassinations are also required by Trump’s executive order, which was signed on Thursday.

“This is a big one. As Trump signed the order at the White House, “a lot of people have been anticipating this for years, for decades.”

“And everything will be revealed”.

The Director of National Intelligence must submit a plan within 15 days for the “full and complete release” of files related to JFK’s assassination, as well as a plan within 45 days for the release of documents on the other two assassinations, according to Trump’s order.

The circumstances of JFK’s assassination in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, have transfixed Americans for decades, with surveys showing widespread doubt about official explanations of the killing.

In a 2023 Gallup poll, 65 percent of Americans said they did not believe the Warren Commission’s finding that Lee Harvey Oswald, a US Marine veteran arrested over JFK’s death, acted alone in killing the president.

One in two people said they thought Oswald had a plot to extort money from the US government, while one in two said they thought he had worked for the CIA.

Robert F Kennedy Jr, Trump’s nominee for health secretary and the son of Robert F Kennedy, claimed in a 2023 interview that there was “overwhelming” evidence of CIA involvement in his uncle’s killing and “very convincing” but “circumstantial” evidence that the intelligence agency was involved in his father’s death.

After signing his order at the Oval Office, Trump handed the pen he used to an aide, saying, “Give that to RFK Jr”.

Criticising Trump’s order, Jack Schlossberg, the grandson of JFK, said his grandfather’s death had not been part of an “inevitable grand scheme”.

When JFK isn’t here to punch back, declassification uses him as a political prop. There’s nothing heroic about it”, Schlossberg, who works as a political correspondent for Vogue magazine, said in a post on X.

A law was passed in the US Congress in 1992 mandating that any unfinished files from the JFK assassination be made public within 25 years unless the president decided that the threat to national security outweighed the public interest in disclosure.

Prior to the 2017 deadline, Trump demanded that more than 2,800 documents be made public, but he caved and resisted the CIA and FBI’s demands to keep a number of thousands of additional documents pending review.

More than 4,700 documents were ordered by the former US President Joe Biden administration, leaving approximately 17, 000 more withheld in part or in full.

In total, more than 99 percent of some 320, 000 documents reviewed since the passage of the 1992 law have been released, according to The National Archives.

King, whose “I Have a Dream” speech became a defining moment of Black Americans ‘ struggle for equality, was fatally shot outside a motel in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968.