- President Trump announced he would release of 80,000 unredacted pages of JFK assassination files on Tuesday afternoon, following his January executive order.
- The documents will be released without summaries or redactions, with DNI Tulsi Gabbard leading the release effort despite speculation that no major revelations will emerge, according to the administration.
- Previously released documents have shown CIA surveillance of Lee Harvey Oswald and tensions between intelligence agencies.
During a visit to the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., on Monday, President Donald Trump promised the release on Tuesday of 80,000 unredacted pages of material related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
“We are tomorrow announcing and giving all of the Kennedy files,” Trump told reporters. “So people have been waiting for decades for this, and I’ve instructed my people that are responsible.”
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has been at the forefront of the release of the documents. Gabbard teased the impending release at the beginning of March.
“We have a tremendous amount of paper — you’ve got a lot of reading," Trump continued. “I don’t believe we’re going to redact anything. I said, ‘Just don’t redact, you can’t redact.' But we’re going to be releasing the JFK files.”
He added, “They’ll be released tomorrow afternoon. It’s going to be very interesting.”
When asked if there will be summaries of the findings, Trump said, “No, there will not be summaries. You’ll write your own summaries. It’s many pages, is it 80,000 pages? Approximately 80,000 pages, and you’ll make your own determination.”
Trump signed an executive order on Jan. 23 to release the President John F. Kennedy, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. files “without delay.”
The executive order required Gabbard and Attorney General Pam Bondi to present a plan for the full release of the JFK assassination records within 15 days, and required them to present a plan to release the RFK and MLK records within 45 days of the order.
However, many, including the New York Post, speculate Tuesday’s document release will turn up “no new bombshells.”
President Kennedy was fatally shot in a motorcade in downtown Dallas, Texas, in November 1963. The official investigation concluded that the gunman and assassin was Lee Harvey Oswald and that he acted alone, as the Deseret News previously reported.
Thousands of documents have been already released, and they provide evidence that the CIA had longstanding surveillance of Oswald and that Oswald communicated with the Soviet Union and Cuba.
Other released documents show internal tension between CIA and FBI agents on how the agencies were monitoring Oswald.
Trump has not officially announced when the administration will release the RFK and MLK Jr. documents.