Trump signs order to declassify files on JFK, MLK assassinations

WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump late on Thursday signed an order related to the declassification of files on the assassinations of former president John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr., an aide to Trump said.

“A lot of people are waiting for this for long, for years, for decades,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday. The order directs top administration officials to present a plan to declassify the documents within 15 days.

That does not make it certain it will happen, however. John F Kennedy was killed in Dallas in 1963. His brother Robert F Kennedy was assassinated while running for president in California 1968, just two months after King, America’s most famous civil rights leader, was murdered in Memphis, Tennessee.

Many of the documents related to the investigations have been released in the years since, although thousands still remain redacted, particularly related to the sprawling JFK investigation.

John F Kennedy was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald, a Marine veteran who had defected to the Soviet Union and later returned to the United States. A government commission determined that Oswald acted alone. However, unanswered questions have long dogged the case, and have given rise to alternative theories about the involvement of government agents, the mafia and other nefarious characters - as well as more outlandish conspiracy theories.

Opinion polls over decades have indicated that most Americans don’t believe Oswald was the sole assassin. In 1992, Congress passed a law to release all documents related to the investigation within 25 years.

Both Trump in his first term and President Joe Biden released piles of JFK-related documents, but thousands – out of a total of millions – still remain partially or fully secret. Trump promised to declassify all of the files in his first term, but held back on his promise after CIA and FBI officials persuaded him to keep some files secret. Today’s executive order states that continued secrecy “is not consistent with the public interest”.