President Donald Trump has announced that tens of thousands of pages related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy will be released to the public on Tuesday.
“People have been waiting decades for this,” Trump said during a speech at the Kennedy Center on Monday, adding that the files—an estimated 80,000 pages—are not expected to be redacted. “I said during the campaign that I’d do it, and I’m a man of my word.”
The FBI recently uncovered approximately 2,400 previously unrecognized records related to the assassination. These documents, digitized and inventoried, were transferred to the National Archives earlier this year as part of an ongoing declassification process. However, the bureau has not disclosed their contents.
Trump’s move follows an executive order he signed in his first week in office, mandating the declassification of records related to JFK’s assassination, as well as those concerning the killings of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The order required intelligence and justice officials to create a plan for the “full and complete release of records.”
The declassification effort aligns with the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, which required all assassination-related documents to be housed in the National Archives and released over a 25-year period, with limited exceptions. The collection contains over 5 million pages, with more than 97% already accessible to the public.
The National Archives has been steadily disclosing assassination-related materials, with the most recent batch released in August 2023. The upcoming release is expected to provide further insight into one of the most scrutinized events in American history.
