President Trump announced on Tuesday that he will release 80,000 pages of unredacted files about President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, having promised to declassify the documents during the campaign.
“While we are here, I thought it would be appropriate to announce and hand over all of the Kennedy files tomorrow. “People have been waiting for decades for this, and I have instructed my people, including [Director of National Intelligence] Tulsi Gabbard, that they must be released tomorrow,” the president told reporters during a tour of the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC.
“You have a lot of reading. I do not believe we will redact anything. “I said, ‘Just do not redact, you can not redact,'” the president said, adding that it will be about 80,000 pages that he described as “interesting.”
When asked if he had seen what was in the files, he said he had “heard about them” and added, “I am not doing summaries, you will write your own summary.”
In January, Trump issued an executive order directing the release of federal government documents related to the assassinations of Kennedy, former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr.
The order directed the director of national intelligence and the attorney general to present a plan within 15 days for the “full and complete release of records relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.”
During his 2024 campaign, Trump promised to declassify the remaining government documents about the John F. Kennedy assassination, which has remained a source of public interest for decades since Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated Kennedy in Dallas in 1963. Conspiracies have circulated about CIA involvement or the presence of another shooter.
“I said during the campaign that I would do it, and I keep my promises,” Trump said Monday.
Trump made the same promise during his first term, but he eventually withheld some documents due to intelligence concerns.
The last large document dump occurred in 2022, when the National Archives released nearly 13,000 new files relating to the assassination.
Congress passed legislation in 1992 requiring the release of all remaining government records about the John F. Kennedy assassination by October 2017, unless they posed a threat to national defense or intelligence, and both Trump and former President Biden granted extensions to keep certain documents private.
