Trump orders release of JFK, RFK, MLK assassination files

After decades of conspiracy theories, thousands of books and countless movies about who killed President Kennedy, the government’s classified records related to his assassination are set to be released to the public under an executive order signed by President Trump.

Mr. Trump, adding to the blizzard of unilateral actions taken during his first week in office, on Thursday ordered the declassification, as early as Feb. 7, of all government files about Kennedy’s 1963 assassination.

The order also calls for releasing classified records about the assassinations of his brother Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who were both killed in 1968.

“That’s a big one,” Mr. Trump said as he signed the order in the Oval Office. “Lot of people are waiting for this for a long, long time. For years, for decades. And everything will be revealed.”

The public won’t have immediate access to the secret documents.

Mr. Trump’s order gives his attorney general and director of national intelligence 15 days to come up with a plan to release the John F. Kennedy files. They will have 45 days to show the president their plan to make public the files related to the Robert F. Kennedy and King assassinations.

The public is already counting the days. On social media, fans of the president’s move linked to Archive.Gov, the site where the documents will be accessible to the public once they are declassified.

“More promises made and kept,” son Donald Trump Jr. boasted on X.

While not a top campaign promise, releasing the John F. Kennedy files was a pledge Mr. Trump first made in 2016. Mr. Trump repeated the promise in 2024, telling crowds he was determined to carry it out if he won a second term.

President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, while traveling in an open motorcade through Dealey Plaza.

Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested but claimed to be “just a patsy.”

Oswald was killed two days later by nightclub owner Jack Ruby as police ushered the accused assassin through the basement of the Dallas police station. Oswald’s killing fed conspiracy theories that he did not act alone. 

The 1964 Warren Commission determined that Oswald had no accomplices when he shot Kennedy from the sixth floor of a book depository. 

Most Americans don’t buy it.

A 2023 Gallup Poll found that 65% of U.S. adults believed President Kennedy’s assassination involved a conspiracy. Respondents named the U.S. government most often as the co-conspirator.

There has long been mistrust in the government’s conclusion about the assassination.

An estimated 40,000 books, along with television shows and films, have been produced about Kennedy. Oliver Stone’s 1991 thriller revived the unproven theory that Oswald was a scapegoat in an extensive government conspiracy to kill the president.

A 1992 law called for the Kennedy assassination records to be released on Oct. 27, 2017.

At the time, Mr. Trump agreed to extensive redactions to give executive agencies more time to review the material. President Biden issued extensions for those reviews.

“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,” Mr. Trump wrote in the executive order.

Mr. Trump told an aide near the Resolute Desk to give the signing pen to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his nominee to head the Health and Human Services Department.

Mr. Kennedy has long demanded that the files be released on the deaths of his uncle, his father and King. He believes the government may be connected to all of their deaths.

Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated on June 4, 1968, at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, and King was assassinated two months earlier, on April 4, 1968, on a hotel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee. There have been many conspiracy theories about the CIA’s involvement in Mr. King’s death, but none of them have been proved. The CIA and FBI were secretly surveilling King.

In a 1999 lawsuit brought by the King family, a jury unanimously found he was assassinated as the result of a conspiracy involving the U.S. government that included the Mafia and local, state and federal government agencies that were “deeply involved” in his killing.

When he ran for president last year, Mr. Kennedy pledged to release the files if elected. He said there was overwhelming evidence of CIA involvement in President Kennedy’s killing. 

“There were multiple people involved. And most of the people in that investigation believed that it was the CIA that was behind it — because the evidence was so overwhelming to them,” Mr. Kennedy said on Fox News in 2023.