President Donald Trump has signed an executive order to declassify the information surrounding the assassinations of former President John F. Kennedy, his brother, former U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, and Civil Rights leader and Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
According to an announcement from the White House, the files have not been fully released to the public in over 50 years since the assassinations took place, with the statement adding the families of President Kennedy and Dr. King, as well as the American people, deserve to have full disclosure and transparency around their respective deaths.
The statement notes that the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 required all documents related to the assassination of Kennedy to be publicly disclosed in full by October 26, 2017.
However, the information could remain undisclosed if a president finds there is “identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations; and (ii) the identifiable harm is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure.”
“I previously accepted proposed redactions from executive departments and agencies … in 2017 and 2018 but ordered the continued re-evaluation of those remaining redactions,” Trump said in the statement, “In the Presidential Memorandum of April 26, 2018, I also ordered agencies to re-review each of those redactions over the next 3 years and disclose information that no longer warrants continued withholding under the standard set forth.”
Trump noted former President Joe Biden also delayed the files being disclosed to the public in 2021, 2022, and 2023 to give agencies sufficient amount of time to review the records and what they wanted to continue to withhold.
“I have now determined 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 the release of these records is long overdue,” Trump said, “And although no Act of Congress directs the release of information pertaining 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 Federal Government’s possession pertaining to each of those assassinations is also in the public interest.”
The Director of National Intelligence and the Attorney General, alongside the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs and the Counsel to the President, are now tasked with presenting a plan to release the documents related to Kennedy’s assassination file to Trump within the next 15 days. The same agencies will have approximately 45 days to present a similar plan to Trump related to the assassination of Dr. King.
During the executive order’s signing, Trump told reporters people had been waiting for decades for the information around the assassinations to be released.
“A lot of people have been waiting for this for years, for decades, and everything will be revealed,” Trump said before asking to have the pen he used to sign the order handed to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
