President Trump announced he will release 80,000 pages of unredacted files Tuesday about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, after promising on the campaign trail to declassify the documents.
“While we’re here, I thought it would be appropriate — we are, tomorrow, announcing and giving all of the Kennedy files. 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,” the president told reporters while touring the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.
“You got a lot of reading. I don’t believe we’re going to redact anything. I said, ‘just don’t redact, you can’t redact,’” the president said, adding it will be about 80,000 pages that he described as “interesting.”
He said he has “heard about them” when asked if he has seen what’s in the files; he added, “I’m not doing summaries, you’ll write your own summary.”
Trump in January signed an executive order directing the release of federal government documents related to the assassinations of Kennedy, former Attorney General Robert F .Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.
The order instructed the director of national intelligence and attorney general to present a plan within 15 days for the “full and complete release of records relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.”
Trump promised during his 2024 campaign to declassify the remaining government documents about the John F. Kennedy assassination, which has remained a point of public interest for decades after Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in 1963 by Lee Harvey Oswald. Conspiracies have persisted about CIA involvement or the existence of another shooter.
“I said during the campaign I’d do it, and I’m a man of my word,” Trump said Monday.
Trump made the same pledge during his first term, but he ultimately kept some documents under wraps amid intelligence concerns.
The last large dump of documents was in 2022, when the National Archives released nearly 13,000 new files related to the assassination.
Congress passed legislation in 1992 requiring all remaining government records about the John F. Kennedy assassination to be released by October 2017, unless they posed certain risks to national defense or intelligence, and both Trump and former President Biden issued extensions to keep certain documents private.
