Tens of thousands of previously secret FBI files on the 1963 assassination of former President John F. Kennedy will be released this week, President Donald Trump has announced.
Tuesday afternoon's release will see some 80,000 pages made public, and Trump said on Monday he ordered his officials not to redact the "very interesting" six-decade-old files.
"You got a lot of reading. I don't believe we're going to redact anything. I said, 'just don't redact. You can't redact.' But we're going to be releasing the JFK files," he said. "They've been waiting for that for decades. And I said during the campaign I'd release them, and I'm a man of my word. So tomorrow, you have the JFK files."
Trump ordered on January 23 the declassification of all government records related to the assassinations of former Kennedy, his brother, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, and civil rights icon Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Trump's order says he has determined that the release of the government documents pertaining to the men's killings, all of which occurred more than 60 years ago, is "in the public interest."
Overdue release
A 1992 law ordered the release of all files pertaining to the killing of JFK by 2017, but allowed presidents to forestall their public dissemination if they certified that releasing them would have created "an identifiable harm to the military defence, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations" that outweighed the public interest.
Trump, in his first term, and then former President Joe Biden, throughout his time in office, consistently postponed their release.
The FBI recently uncovered 2,400 previously undisclosed records related to the assassination, found within 14,000 pages of documents during a review triggered by President Trump's January 2023 executive order to release all JFK assassination files.
The records, which were not submitted to the JFK Assassination Records Review Board or the National Archives, may contain critical details about the investigation that were kept secret for decades.
