White House releases JFK assassination files
The administration of US President Donald Trump has released thousands of pages of government files related to the assassination of former US President John F. Kennedy (JFK) in Dallas on November 22, 1963.
The National Archives uploaded some 63,000 pages of documents on its website in two initial tranches on Tuesday, with more files expected to be publish once they are digitized.
“All records previously withheld for classification that are part of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection are released,” it said.
Shortly after taking office on January 20, Trump signed an executive order to declassify government documents related to the assassinations during the 1960s of John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr.
The shooting of JFK has long been the subject of speculation in the US regarding the alleged role of rogue elements within the government.
A poll by Gallup in 2023 suggested that 65% of Americans did not believe the findings of the official investigation, which concluded Lee Harvey Oswald, a former US Marine, acted alone in killing the 35th US president. Among those surveyed, 20% said they believed that Oswald conspired with the US government, while another 16% suggested that the CIA had been involved.
Trump told reporters on Monday that “people have been waiting decades” for the publication of the JFK assassination files. Approximately 80,000 pages of previously classified records would be made available to the public, he added.
“I said during the campaign that I would do it, and I am a man of my word,” the president insisted.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) said in a statement on Tuesday that the records are being released in fulfillment of Trump’s promise of “maximum transparency and a commitment to rebuild the trust of the American people in the Intelligence Community (IC) and federal agencies.”
Scholars, historians, and journalists are likely to spend months sifting through the records for new information about Kennedy’s killing, with the newly published files being identified only by record numbers and having no descriptions.
