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

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

“That’s a big one,” Trump said as put his signature to the order in the Oval Office. He asked an aide standing nearby to give the marker to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who he’s nominated to be secretary of Health and Human Services.

Trump has long vowed to make the information public. He released a trove of documents in 2017 related to the 1963 killing of John F. Kennedy but left 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 that they be withheld longer.

According to the White House text of the order, Trump has “now determined that the continued redaction and withholding of information” on JFK “is not consistent with the public interest and the release of these records is long overdue.”

“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 order states.

The records, however, will not immediately be made available.

The order gives the director of national intelligence and 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 records in the collection, which contain 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 entirely redacted.

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

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

When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stood on stage with Trump in August after making his endorsement, Trump announced he would establish a “a new independent presidential commission on assassination attempts” tasked with releasing “all remaining documents pertaining to President John F. Kennedy’s assassination and other events in question.”

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 on the night he won the 1968 California Democratic presidential primary by Sirhan Sirhan. King was killed in Memphis, where he was supporting a sanitation workers strike, by James Earl Ray.

“Lot of people are waiting for this for a long — for years and decades,” Trump said as he signed the order on Thursday.

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