President Donald Trump has ordered officials to declassify files related to the assassinations of former President John F. Kennedy, former U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. The executive order, signed last week, requires the Director of National Intelligence and the attorney general to review the documents and present a plan for their full and complete release within 45 days.
This is not the first time the JFK files have been expected to be released. Congress passed the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, mandating that all records be housed in a single collection and be released within 25 years, barring any postponements for security reasons. Trump had initially promised to release the last batch of documents during his first term, but such efforts ultimately dissipated.
Trump’s order states 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 that the release of these records is long overdue. The order also applies to the assassinations of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., stating that the release of all records in the Federal Government’s possession pertaining to each of those assassinations is also in the public interest.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was nominated to be the Health and Human Services Secretary, thanked Trump for taking the first step towards reversing the “60-year strategy of lies and secrecy” surrounding the JFK assassination. Jack Schlossberg, JFK’s grandson, reacted to the declassification news, calling it “using JFK as a political prop, when he’s not here to punch back.”
