President Trump announced that tens of thousands of pages of the JFK assassination files would be released to the public Tuesday.
“People have been waiting decades for this,” the president said of the release of files related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Mr. Trump, who was speaking at the Kennedy Center Monday, added that he didn’t believe the material, “approximately 80,000 pages,” would be redacted.
“I said during the campaign that I’d do it, and I’m a man of my word,” the president said of the impending release.
Last month, the FBI said it had discovered roughly 2,400 records related to the assassination during a search stemming from Mr. Trump’s executive action ordering files related to the 1963 killing to be declassified.
The bureau said that the documents, which have been inventoried and digitized, “were previously unrecognized as related to the JFK assassination case file.” The FBI in February was transferring the records to the National Archives and Records Administration to be included in the ongoing declassification process that has been ongoing. The bureau did not say what the records contain.
In his first week in office, Mr. Trump signed an executive order that called for the declassification of these files and also those related to the assassinations of his brother Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.
The order gave the director of national intelligence and attorney general 15 days to present a plan to the president for the “full and complete release of records” related to Kennedy’s assassination.
Congress in 1992 enacted the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, which required all assassination-related material be kept in a single collection within the National Archives and be publicly released. The law gave federal agencies 25 years to process and disclose the documents, with exceptions. The collection at the National Archives consists of more than 5 million pages of records.
The National Archives has over the last three decades made material related to Kennedy’s assassination available to the public, with the latest batch disclosed in August 2023. The agency said in December 2022 that more than 97% of records in its Kennedy collection are available to the American people.
Melissa Quinn is a politics reporter for CBSNews.com. She has written for outlets including the Washington Examiner, Daily Signal and Alexandria Times. Melissa covers U.S. politics, with a focus on the Supreme Court and federal courts.
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