He continues to generate more than 60 years later. Part of the official documents related to the attack that ended his life in Dallas on November 22, 1963 remained confidential. The new president of the United States, Donald Trump, this Thursday signed ordering its complete declassification, as well as that of the documents related to the assassination of his brother, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, in June 1968 in Los Angeles (California) and that of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, in Memphis (Tennessee) that same year.
“Their families and the American people deserve transparency and truth. “It is in the national interest that all records related to these murders are finally released without delay,” he says.
The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Compilation Act of 1992 required that all records related to the assassination be made public in their entirety by October 26, 2017. However, it provided exceptions for the case of that the president certify that keeping them secret was necessary because of identifiable harm to military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or the conduct of foreign relations and that that year was of such severity that it exceeded the public interest in disclosure.
It was Trump himself, who was president in 2017, who prevented them from being published in their entirety, although he now presents himself as a crusader for transparency. The thousands of documents that were not yet public were published partially censored and some of them remained secret in the official secrets files. “I have no choice but to accept certain conditions rather than cause irreversible damage to the security of the nation,” Trump said on that occasion.
Trump justifies himself by saying that he did so following the advice of the corresponding government agencies, although the final decision was exclusively his. At the same time, he ordered that its dissemination be periodically reevaluated. Biden issued subsequent certifications regarding these records in 2021, 2022, and 2023, which gave agencies additional time to review them and retain some of the information.
Without apologizing, Trump rectifies. “I have now determined that the continued concealment and withholding of information from records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy is not consistent with the public interest and the release of these records should have occurred a long time ago,” says the Republican.
The assassination was officially attributed to Lee Harvey Oswald, a deranged former Marine who came to live and marry in the Soviet Union. But the size of the crime and the almost immediate death of its alleged perpetrator at the hands of mobster Jack Ruby fueled all kinds of conspiracy theories. Many have suggested that the CIA and FBI knew much more about Oswald and the assassination than they officially acknowledged.
Trump also triples the renewed commitment to transparency with two other of the most notorious political assassinations in the turbulent American history of the last century. “Although no law of Congress mandates the release of information relating to the assassinations of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I have determined that the release of all records in the possession of the Federal Government relating to each “One of these murders is also of public interest,” he adds in his executive order.
The diffusion will not be immediate. The decree orders that in the next 15 days, the director of National Intelligence and the attorney general, in coordination with White House officials, present a plan to Trump “for the full and complete disclosure of records related to the assassination of the President John F. Kennedy.” For the other murders, the deadline to present the plan is 45 days. The order does not specify when those documents will be made public.
