President Donald Trump has announced that 80,000 pages of unredacted files on ex-President John F Kennedy’s assassination will be released tomorrow.
Trump broke the news on the much-anticipated release of the files as reporters toured the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC, on Monday.
‘While we’re here, I thought it would be appropriate – we are, tomorrow, announcing and giving all of the Kennedy files,’ he said.
‘So, people have been waiting for decades for this, and I’ve instructed my people… lots of different people, (director of national intelligence) Tulsi Gabbard, that they must be released tomorrow.’
Trump called the to-be-released files ‘interesting’.
‘You got a lot of reading,’ he said.
‘I don’t believe we’re going to redact anything. I said, “just don’t redact, you can’t redact.”‘
When asked if he has read the files, Trump said he has ‘heard about them’.
‘I’m not doing summaries, you’ll write your own summary,’ he said.
Trump signed an executive order in January directing the director of national intelligence and the attorney general to provide a plan for the ‘full and complete release of records relating to the assassination of President John F Kennedy’ within 15 days.
He promised on the campaign trail last year that he would order the declassification of all remaining documents on the assassination.
‘I said during the campaign I’d do it, and I’m a man of my word,’ he said on Monday.
Trump also ordered the release of records on the ex-president’s brother, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr.
The FBI in February said it found roughly 2,400 lost files on Kennedy’s 1963 assassination and was working on transferring them to the National Archives and Records Administration for declassification.
The Justice Department later that month released hundreds of files to a conservative group, but Attorney General Pam Bondi said there were more still.
The last sizable release of JFK records was in 2022, when the National Archives made 13,000 new files available.
Trump during his first term vowed to make the remaining JFK files public, but wound up keeping some of them secret due to intelligence concerns.
Numerous questions remain around Kennedy’s assassination, including whether former US marine Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, the roles of the CIA and FBI in monitoring Oswald, and further details on Oswald’s murder by Jack Ruby.
About 80,000 pages are expected to be released on the heels of the FBI disclosing a new dossier on the DB Cooper case, which sparked wild conspiracy theories in the US.
It concerns the only unsolved commercial airline hijacking, in which Dan Cooper in 1971 demanded $200,000 and multiple parachutes on a flight from Portland to Seattle. The plane landed and let 35 passengers off, then four crew members joined Cooper on another flight to Mexico City, but he leapt out on a parachute and was never found.
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