JFK assassination files to be declassified under Trump order

President Trump has signed an executive order to release classified files held by the federal government on the assassinations of John F Kennedy, his brother Robert F Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.

The executive order gives Trump’s director of national intelligence 15 days to develop a plan to release all the remaining classified information on the death of President Kennedy in 1963. It gives them 45 days to plan how to release the remaining files on the other Kennedy and King, who were shot dead two months apart in 1968.

“A lot of people have been waiting for this for years, for decades,” Trump, 78, said as he signed the order in the Oval Office. “And everything will be revealed.” 

 

• Trump’s return can blow JFK assassination theories wide open

It is unclear exactly how long it will take to release the files. Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s choice of national intelligence director, is expected to face questions on it when she appears before the Senate intelligence committee for her confirmation hearing on January 30.

Experts on the JFK assassination have long believed that the US government deliberately withheld information that would fundamentally alter the accepted history of his death at the age of 46.

An investigation by the Warren Commission determined that Lee Harvey Oswald, a Marine veteran who had previously defected to the Soviet Union, acted alone when he fired on the presidential motorcade from a building overlooking Dealey Plaza in Dallas: 

However, Oswald’s death days later at the hands of Jack Ruby, a local nightclub owner, fuelled decades of conspiracy theories.

Robert F Kennedy Jr, the nephew of the assassinated president who is now Trump’s nominee for health secretary, has repeatedly alleged that the assassination was ordered by the CIA. “The evidence is overwhelming that the CIA was involved in the murder and in the cover-up,” he said in 2023.

 

He has claimed the assassination was revenge for the president’s decision not to provide air cover during the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961. RFK Jr’s father, the New York senator and former US attorney-general Robert F Kennedy, was the frontrunner in the Democratic presidential primary when he was shot just after midnight on June 5, 1968, at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

He was shot three times by Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian, and was pronounced dead in hospital shortly afterwards, aged 42. Sirhan was convicted of first-degree murder in 1969 and sentenced to death. This was commuted to a life sentence in 1972 and he remains incarcerated at the Richard J Donovan Correctional Facility near San Diego, California.

King was shot dead on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968, at the age of 39. James Earl Ray, a 40-year-old escaped fugitive, later confessed to the crime and was sentenced to a 99-year prison term. 

 

In the years after King’s assassination, doubts about the case against Ray emerged after it was revealed that King’s activities as a civil rights leader had been extensively watched by the FBI and other government agencies.

Trump’s executive order reads: “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.”