Any surviving documents from the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert F. Kennedy, and civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. will be declassified, according to President Trump’s announcement. At the White House on Thursday, he signed an executive order.
The president is signing an executive action “ordering the declassification of data connected to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and Dr. Reverend Martin Luthern King Jr.,” an aide said. Mr. Trump said, “That’s a big one, huh? Many individuals have been waiting for this for years or even decades.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the late Robert F. Kennedy’s son and Mr. Trump’s choice to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, was given the pen the president used to sign the order by his aide. When he was killed in 1968, the elder Kennedy was a Democratic presidential candidate, a U.S. attorney general, and a senator from New York.
The attorney general and director of national intelligence, neither of whom has been confirmed yet, are being instructed by Mr. Trump to spend the next fifteen days devising a strategy for making the JFK files public. They then have forty-five days to devise arrangements for the release of all the MLK and RFK documents.
“Requires the review within 15 days of’records related to’ the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and within 45 days related to the assassinations of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.” The FBI said in a statement given to CBS News Thursday night that it is “complying” with the executive order.
According to the FBI, the directive “also requires designated agencies to submit a plan to the White House for ‘the full and complete release of these records.'” The FBI will collaborate with the Department of Justice and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) to identify records that are relevant to the EO.
The National Archives and Records Administration stated that 97% of the approximately 5 million pages in its collection pertaining to the assassination were made public with the release of portions of the JFK files in 2022.
During his first term in office in 2017, the president pledged to make the remaining JFK documents public. Not all of the papers were made public during his first term, although that included about 30,000 previously published records with redactions and about 3,000 pages that had never been made public.
Congress ordered in 1992 that all assassination records be made public within 25 years.
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