Trump admin releases JFK assassination files after 60 years of secrecy

Key Takeaways

• The Trump administration released 80,000 pages of JFK assassination files, promising no redactions.
• The FBI recently discovered around 2,400 previously unknown records related to the assassination.

The Trump administration today released roughly 80,000 pages of files related to President John Kennedy’s assassination, following decades of public demand for transparency about the 1963 event.

“People have been waiting decades for this,” President Trump said in a speech at the Kennedy Center on Monday, promising the documents would be released without redactions. “I said during the campaign that I’d do it, and I’m a man of my word.”

During his 2024 campaign, Trump pledged to declassify and release all documents related to the JFK assassination. He emphasized that after nearly 60 years of secrecy, the American people deserve the truth.

He fulfilled this promise on January 23 through an executive order, titled “Declassification of Records Concerning the Assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.”

It directed the declassification of documents related to these assassinations, which have been the subject of numerous conspiracy theories due to the classification of many related records.

Following Trump’s executive order, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) discovered approximately 2,400 previously unknown assassination records during an internal search last month.

The FBI located these documents at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). NARA has been releasing portions of the JFK Assassination Records Collection over several decades, following the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992.

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