President Trump announced that he’ll declassify any remaining files from the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert F. Kennedy and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. He signed an executive order at the White House Thursday.
After an aide announced the president was signing the executive action “ordering the declassification of files relating to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and Dr. Reverend Martin Luthern King Jr.,” Mr. Trump said, “That’s a big one, huh? A lot of people are waiting for this for a long — for years, for decades.”
The president instructed his aide to give the pen he used to sign the order to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the son of the late Robert F. Kennedy and Mr. Trump’s nominee to run the Department of Health and Human Services. The elder Kennedy served as U.S. attorney general and New York senator and was a Democratic presidential candidate when he was slain in 1968.
Mr. Trump’s order requires the director of national intelligence and attorney general — neither official has been confirmed yet — to spend the next 15 days coming up with a plan to release the JFK files. Then, they have 45 days to come up with plans to release all the RFK and MLK files.
“For us, the assassination of our father is a deeply personal family loss that we have endured over the last 56 years. We hope to be provided the opportunity to review the files as a family prior to its public release,” the King family said in a statement late Thursday.
In a statement provided to CBS News Thursday evening, the FBI said it is “complying” with the executive order that “requires the review within 15 days of ‘records related to’ the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and within 45 days related to the assassinations of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.”
The FBI added the order “also requires designated agencies to submit a plan to the White House for ‘the full and complete release of these records.’ The FBI is identifying records responsive to the EO and will work with the Department of Justice and ODNI (Office of the Director of National Intelligence) respectively.”
After a release of some of the JFK files in 2022, the National Archives and Records Administration said 97% of the roughly 5 million pages in its collection related to the assassination were public.
The president promised during his first administration in 2017 that he would release the remaining JFK files. That included some 3,000 documents that had never been made public and 30,000 that had been previously released with redactions, but not all of the files were made public during his first term.