- President DonaldTrump ordered the declassification of all records related to JFK's assassination within 15 days.
- The declassification of all records related to RFK and MLK Jr.'s assassination will follow within 45 days.
- Read more for what people deem unresolved questions.
In an executive order Thursday, President Donald Trump announced that all records related to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. will be released to the public “without delay.”
“Their families and the American people deserve transparency and truth,” Trump said.
Within 15 days, the director of national intelligence and the attorney general are expected to present a plan for the full release of the JFK assassination records, and within 45 days, they should present a plan for the release of the RFK and MLK records, according to the order.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was 14 years old when his father was assassinated after winning the California Democratic primary in the 1968 presidential election.
On X, RFK Jr. expressed support for the release of the assassination documents.
He wrote, “The 60-year strategy of lies and secrecy, disinformation, censorship and defamation employed by Intel officials to obscure and suppress troubling facts about JFK’s assassination has provided the playbook for a series of subsequent crises ... .”
Previous administrations have delayed release of the records
The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 required the compilation of all government records related to JFK’s assassination and ordered them to be released to the public in full after 25 years, which fell on Oct. 26, 2017.
When the time came to release the records, Trump, during his first term as president, released over 53,000 of the JFK documents but withheld a portion because the FBI and the CIA requested more time to review and redact sensitive information, per Spectrum News NY1.
Then in 2021, 2022 and 2023, former President Joe Biden released over 17,000 documents.
What is known and not known about JFK’s assassination?
JFK was fatally shot in a motorcade in downtown Dallas, Texas, on Nov. 22, 1963. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren led the official investigation into the assassination and concluded that the gunman was Lee Harvey Oswald and that he acted alone.
The Dallas Police Department caught Oswald a little over an hour after the assassination happened. Then, while being transferred to the county jail on Nov. 24, Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner, fatally shot Oswald on camera in front of journalists, photographers and law enforcement officers. Ruby was sentenced to death row on the charge of premeditated murder.
The thousands of documents released to date, though many redacted, have revealed the CIA’s longstanding surveillance of Oswald and reported his interactions with the Soviet Union and Cuba.
Internal CIA and FBI records also reveal criticism within the departments on how agents were monitoring Oswald.
Some documents revealed things seemingly unconnected to JFK, including CIA plots to assassinate then-Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.
For years after the shooting, people tried to cast doubt on the official account, but up to this point there is no evidence that anyone other than Oswald was involved in the shooting.
As The New York Times reported in July 2023, the remaining redactions are believed to protect living people’s identities, addresses and intelligence facilities.
What documents have been released about RFK’s assassination?
On the night of his political victory in California, RFK gave a speech at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. A little after midnight, he took a shortcut to exit the hotel through the kitchen pantry area. As he greeted the kitchen staff, Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian immigrant, shot him three times at close range, and Kennedy died the next day, per the Library of Congress.
Authorities believe Sirhan plotted to kill Kennedy over the presidential candidate’s support for Israel.
Gerald Posner, the author of "Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK," told The New York Post that Sirhan was an “assassin made from Central Casting in terms of motive.”
Posner referenced Sirhan’s journals which described extensively his hatred of the presidential candidate.
“It’s really why the RFK conspiracy theories haven’t gotten any traction,” Posner said.
Many documents regarding RFK’s assassination are currently held by the California State Archives. The collection overview reports that California’s archive consists of 50,000 pages, over 4,800 interviews, nearly 3,000 photographs, and the investigation took over 6,400 hours.
MLK Jr.‘s family requests to review the files prior to their public release
Martin Luther King Jr. was fatally shot while on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968, as he was preparing to deliver a speech that night, per Stanford University.
In 2023, the Department of Justice published an overview of an investigation into two claims of conspiracy by Loyd Jowers, the owner of a restaurant near the assassination site, and Donald Wilson, a former FBI agent.
Jowers claimed to have received $100,000 to hire a hitman to kill the civil rights leader and named “Raoul” as a conspirator.
Wilson claimed he found papers in the assassin James Earl Ray’s car that referenced the same name and claimed the FBI was somehow involved in the assassination.
The department found no evidence to either men’s claims.
In a statement on X, King’s family responded to Trump’s executive order. They described MLK Jr.‘s assassination as a “deeply personal family loss that we have endured over the last 56 years” and requested ”to be provided the opportunity to review the files as a family prior to its public release.”