U.S. President Donald Trump has announced that all remaining secret JFK assassination files, totaling approximately 80,000 pages, will be released today.
“People have been waiting decades for this,” Trump stated while speaking at the Kennedy Center on Monday. He emphasized that the documents would be released in full and that he did not expect any redactions.
“I said during the campaign that I’d do it, and I’m a man of my word,” he added.
Last month, the FBI revealed that it had discovered around 2,400 additional records related to President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination during a search prompted by Trump’s executive action to declassify all relevant documents. The FBI stated that these records, previously unrecognized as part of the case, had been digitized and transferred to the National Archives and Records Administration. However, the agency did not disclose their contents.
Trump signed an executive order in his first week in office directing the declassification of files not only related to JFK’s assassination but also those concerning the assassinations of his brother, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. The order required the director of national intelligence and attorney general to submit a plan within 15 days for the “full and complete release of records.”
The release follows the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, which mandated that all assassination-related documents be stored in a single collection within the National Archives and made public. Federal agencies were given 25 years to process and disclose the records, though some exceptions were allowed.
The National Archives currently holds over 5 million pages of JFK assassination records, with more than 97% of the collection already available to the public. The most recent batch was disclosed in August 2023.
