President Trump said he will release on Tuesday afternoon 80,000 pages of files relating to President John F. Kennedy’s assassination and described their contents as “very interesting.”
“You’ve got a lot of reading. I don’t believe we are going to redact anything. I said, ‘Don’t redact. You can’t redact anything,’” Mr. Trump told reporters Monday at the Kennedy Center.
“They’ve been waiting for that for decades and I said during the campaign I’d do it and I’m a man of my word,” he continued.
Mr. Trump said he’s heard about the files and described them as “very interesting.”
Earlier this year, Mr. Trump signed an executive order directing the federal government to present a plan to release records related to the assassinations of Kennedy, his brother Robert Kennedy, and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
The order, signed just days after Mr. Trump returned to the White House, 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 immediately began 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.
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.
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 “JFK” 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.
