Trump releases once classified files on JFK assassination

Fulfilling a campaign promise to make the material public.

President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday released previously classified documents related to the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy, fulfilling a campaign promise to make the material public.

Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence, in a post on X shared a link to a page on the National Archives and Records Administration website with the records, and touted the move as a symbol of how the president is “ushering in a new era of maximum transparency.” She added the files were being “released to the public with no redactions.”

The release consisted of approximately 80 000 pages of previously classified records being published without redactions, according to a statement from Gabbard’s office. Other documents held under court seal or for grand jury secrecy or subject to the Internal Revenue Code must be unsealed before release, the statement said, adding that “NARA is working with the Department of Justice to expedite the unsealing of these records.”

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The collection of assassination records already “consists of over six million pages of records, photographs, motion pictures, sound recordings, and artifacts,” according to the NARA website.

Trump while visiting the Kennedy Center, the Washington performing arts concert hall and theater dedicated to the former president, had announced that he would be releasing the documents.

“We have a tremendous amount of paper. You’ve got a lot of reading,” he told reporters Monday, adding that he hadn’t received an executive summary of what was contained in those files.

Trump had vowed to release the documents during his first term in office, but ultimately relented to requests from the intelligence community to keep much of the classified material under wraps. But the president reiterated his pledge during the most recent presidential campaign.

In January, Trump signed an executive order he said would declassify documents related to the assassinations of Kennedy, his brother, Senator Robert Kennedy and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

The order, signed by Trump in the Oval Office, said that any possible harm to defense, intelligence, law enforcement, or diplomatic operations was outweighed by the public interest.

During an interview with the All-In podcast last year, Trump suggested that the Central Intelligence Agency was behind the request to delay release during his first term in office and would likely prefer he not declassify the additional documents.

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