DALLAS — Previously classified documents related to the of President were released Tuesday following shortly after he took office.
The documents were posted on the website of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. The vast majority of the National Archives’ collection of over 6 million pages of records, photographs, motion pictures, sound recordings and artifacts related to the assassination have previously been released.
Trump told reporters Monday that has administration will be releasing 80,000 files, though it’s not clear how many of those are among the millions of pages of records that have already been made public.
“We have a tremendous amount of paper. You’ve got a lot of reading,” Trump said the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington.
Researchers have estimated that 3,000 records or so , either in whole or in part. And last month, that it had discovered about 2,400 new records related to the assassination.
Many who have studied what’s been released so far by the government say the public shouldn’t anticipate any earth-shattering revelations from the newly released documents, but there is still intense interest in details related to the assassination and the events surrounding it.
Trump’s January order directed the national intelligence director and attorney general to develop a plan to release the records.
Kennedy was killed on Nov. 22, 1963, on a . As his motorcade was finishing its parade route downtown, shots rang out from the building. Police arrested 24-year-old , who had positioned himself from a sniper’s perch on the sixth floor. Two days later, nightclub owner Jack Ruby fatally shot Oswald during a jail transfer.
A year after the assassination, the Warren Commission, which President Lyndon B. Johnson established to investigate, concluded that Oswald acted alone and that there was no evidence of a conspiracy. But that didn’t quell a web of alternative theories over the decades.
In the early 1990s, the federal government mandated that all assassination-related documents be housed in a single collection in the National Archives and Records Administration. The collection was required to be , barring any exemptions designated by the president.
Trump, who took office for his first term in 2017, had said that he would allow the release of all of the remaining records but ended up holding some back because of what he called the . And while files during President Joe Biden’s administration, some remained unseen.
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