The Justice Department is moving to unseal F.B.I. surveillance records of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. about two years before their court-ordered release. The request was made over the objections of the civil rights organization Dr. King founded, which fears details of his private life will be used to tarnish his legacy.
In a 28-page filing dated Monday, Ed Martin, the Trump-appointed interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, cited “strong public interest in understanding the truth about the assassination.” The materials could include the contents of wiretaps, hidden microphones and reports from agents.
The request represents a sharp reversal for the F.B.I. and the Justice Department, which have blocked or slow-walked the release of investigative files for decades under presidents from both parties. President Trump, who ordered the move, has floated alternative theories about political assassinations, stoking doubts about the role played by the bureau in perpetuating those theories.
A federal judge in Washington has yet to schedule a hearing on the motion.
In his filing, Mr. Martin said the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the civil rights organization based in Atlanta that Dr. King used as his base of operations, “currently opposes” the motion.
Mr. Martin, a far-right political activist who recently compared government diversity programs to the decades-long campaign of racist repression and terror in the Jim Crow South, said he was following through on an executive order by Mr. Trump.
Dr. King’s relatives have raised questions about the federal investigation into his death, which concluded that it was the work of a lone racist assassin, James Earl Ray.
But they have also expressed concern that the Trump administration would dump all of the files in the case into the public domain, possibly airing biased or fabricated accounts of his private life to smear him.
Some supporters of Mr. Trump — whose administration is rapidly dismantling federal civil rights initiatives championed by Dr. King — have questioned his status as an American hero.
“For us, the assassination of our father is a deeply personal family loss that we have endured over the last 56 years,” his children wrote in a statement in late January, after Mr. Trump announced that he was pushing to quickly release the material. “We hope to be provided the opportunity to review the files as a family prior to its public release.”
It is not clear if the Trump administration agreed to that accommodation. Mr. Martin said the material would be reviewed by his boss, Attorney General Pam Bondi, before it was made public.
The King family did not respond to a request for comment. But the Rev. Al Sharpton, who is close to Dr. King’s son Martin Luther King III, said the family had asked the administration for a meeting to go over the contents of the disclosure before they were released, and had yet to hear back.
“There is a concern that not everything in those files will be truthful,” Mr. Sharpton said in an interview.
The president has ordered the release of previously undisclosed investigative files related to Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual assault case and jailhouse death as well as the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert F. Kennedy.
Already, the administration has released files related to Mr. Epstein and John Kennedy, though the revelations have been modest. Many of the Epstein files had already been made public. And while there might be new information embedded in the tens of thousands of documents on the Kennedy assassination released since late Tuesday, most of the material has been available through other sources for years.
The King records might be different. In 2019, David J. Garrow, a Pulitzer Prize-winning King biographer, examined a trove of previously unreleased documents at the National Archives that provided salacious details about Dr. King’s sex life. The material had been gathered in bugged hotel rooms as part of a campaign by the F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover to destroy the reputations of civil rights leaders in the 1960s.
Mr. Garrow was sharply criticized for publishing the material. Critics accused him of airing details that had been illegally obtained and curated by Mr. Hoover’s team to make Dr. King and other civil rights leaders appear in the worst possible light.
The effort to publicly release the files began in the mid-1970s. Bernard Lee, Dr. King’s longtime assistant, filed suit in the District Court for the District of Columbia against the F.B.I. and several agents for unlawfully monitoring Dr. King’s conversations, seeking monetary damages. The period covered 1963 to 1968, when he emerged as the country’s most powerful proponent for racial equality.
The case was dismissed. But in 1977, tapes, transcripts, wiretap logs and other records were transferred to the National Archives “pursuant to an apparent compromise” between Mr. Lee and the government, Mr. Martin wrote in his motion. The surveillance included conversations recorded at offices used by Dr. King and at his residence in Atlanta.
As part of that deal, the judge in the case — who, along with Mr. Lee, is now dead — ordered the files sealed for 50 years, until Jan. 31, 2027.
Mr. Martin downplayed the significance of his request, arguing that he was asking the court to hand over the materials only “about one year and nine months” early.
“The records have remained shielded from the public for long enough,” he added.
The post Justice Dept. Moves to Release Surveillance Records of Martin Luther King Jr. appeared first on New York Times.
