President Donald Trump signed an executive order at the White House on Thursday to declassify government records related to the assassinations of President John Kennedy, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Trump’s order could put an end to some long-standing questions surrounding the assassinations, all of which occurred more than a half-century ago.
The official conclusions that all three killings were carried out by lone gunmen have been challenged by a raft of conspiracy theories. The fact that some records about the investigations of the murders have remained classified for so long played a role in fueling those theories.
“That’s a big one,” Trump said in the Oval Office as he signed the executive order.
“Lot of people are waiting for this for a long, long time, for years, for decades, and everything will be revealed,” Trump said.
The order requires the director of national intelligence and the attorney general within 15 days to coordinate with the assistant to the president for national security Affairs and Trump’s legal counsel and present a plan to the president “for the full and complete release of records relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.”
It also requires those same people to review the records related to the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and King and present Trump a plan for their “full and complete release.”
The executive order says, “More than 50 years after the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Federal Government has not released to the public all of its records related to those events.”
“Their families and the American people deserve transparency and truth. It is in the national interest to finally release all records related to these assassinations without delay,” the order said.
The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 required all records related to that assassination “to be publicly disclosed in full by October 26, 2017, unless the President certifies that: (i) continued postponement is made necessary by an identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations, and (ii) the identifiable harm is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure.”
Trump during his first term in the White House, in 2017 and 2018, had authorized postponements of full disclosures, as did his successor, former President Joe Biden. On Wednesday night, Trump in an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity said that he had been asked by then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who is a former CIA director, not to declassify remaining records about President Kennedy’s killing.
Trump in Thursday’s order said, “I have now determined that the continued redaction and withholding of information from records pertaining to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy is not consistent with the public interest and the release of these records is long overdue.”
“And although no Act of Congress directs the release of information pertaining to the assassinations of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I have determined that the release of all records in the Federal Government’s possession pertaining to each of those assassinations is also in the public interest,” the order said.
President Kennedy was killed on Nov. 22, 1963, after being shot while riding in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas.
The Democratic icon’s younger brother, Robert Kennedy, who represented New York in the U.S. Senate, was shot on June 5, 1968, in the kitchen of a Los Angeles hotel after winning California’s Democratic presidential primary. He died the following day.
Trump has nominated the late senator’s son, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as secretary of the U.S. Health and Human Services Department.
The civil rights leader King was assassinated two months before RFK, on April 4, 1968, when he was shot while standing on the balcony of a motel in Memphis, Tennessee.
