President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday that aims to declassify the remaining federal records relating to the assassinations of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. The order also orders the release of thousands of classified governmental documents about the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which has fueled conspiracy theories for decades.
The order is among a flurry of executive actions Trump has quickly taken the first week of his second term.
Speaking to reporters, Trump said, “everything will be revealed.”
Dr. King was shot in the neck on a balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968, and later pronounced dead at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Memphis, where he’d been supporting a sanition workers’ strike. He was 39. His admirers expressed profound grief around the world.
Assassination suspect James Earl Ray was captured in London, where he’d fled. He pleaded guilty and was convicted i 1969. He was serving a 99-year sentence when he died in 1998.
The King family, though, has consistently expressed doubt that Ray was the assassin and has said they believe the true killer was Memphis Police Lt. Earl Clark.
The King family released a statement late Thursday night asking for courtesy from the administration in the matter.
“For us, the assassination of our father is a deeply personal family loss that we have endured over the last 56 years,” the statement read. “We hope to be provided the opportunity to review the files as a family prior to its public release.”
The statement ended, “At this time, the King family is not taking any interviews as they await further information.”
The executive order directs the director of national intelligence to immediately review the records related to the shootings of King and RFK, and present a plan for their full release in 45 days. It also directs him to present a plan for the full release of the JFK records within 15 days.
Trump had promised during his reelection campaign to make public the last batches of still-classified documents surrounding President Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, which has transfixed people for decades. He made a similar pledge during his first term, but ultimately bended to appeals from the CIA and FBI to keep some documents withheld.
Trump has nominated Kennedy’s nephew, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to be the health secretary in his new administration. Kennedy, whose father, Robert F. Kennedy, was assassinated in 1968 while running for president and has said he isn’t convinced that a lone gunman was solely responsible for the assassination of his uncle, President Kennedy, in 1963.
The order directs the director of national intelligence and the attorney general to develop a plan within 15 days to declassify the remaining John F. Kennedy records, and within 45 days for the other two cases. It was not clear when the records would actually be released.
Trump handed the pen used to sign the order to an aide and directed it to be given to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Only a few thousand of the millions of governmental records related to the assassination of President Kennedy have yet to be fully declassified. And while many who have studied what’s been released so far say the public shouldn’t anticipate any earth-shattering revelations, there is still an intense interest in details related to the assassination and the events surrounding it.
“There’s always the possibility that something would slip through that would be the tiny tip of a much larger iceberg that would be revealing,” said Larry J. Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics and author of “The Kennedy Half-Century.” “That’s what researchers look for. Now, odds are you won’t find that but it is possible that it’s there.”
Kennedy was fatally shot in downtown Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, as his motorcade passed in front of the Texas School Book Depository building, where 24-year-old assassin Lee Harvey Oswald had positioned himself from a sniper’s perch on the sixth floor. Two days after Kennedy was killed, nightclub owner Jack Ruby fatally shot Oswald during a jail transfer.
In the early 1990s, the federal government mandated that all assassination-related documents be housed in a single collection in the National Archives and Records Administration. The collection of over 5 million records was required to be opened by 2017, barring any exemptions designated by the president.
During his first term, Trump boasted that he’d allow the release of all of the remaining records on the president’s assassination but ended up holding some back because of what he called the potential harm to national security. And while files have continued to be released under President Joe Biden, some still remain unseen.
Sabato, who trains student researchers to comb through the documents, said that most researchers agree that “roughly” 3,000 records have not yet been released, either in whole or in part, and many of those originated with the CIA.
The documents released over the last several years offer details on the way intelligence services operated at the time, and include CIA cables and memos discussing visits by Oswald to the Soviet and Cuban embassies during a trip to Mexico City just weeks before the assassination. The former Marine had previously defected to the Soviet Union before returning home to Texas.
There are still some documents in the collection though that researchers don’t believe the president would be able to release. Around 500 documents, including tax returns, weren’t subject to the 2017 disclosure requirement. And, researchers note, documents have also been destroyed over the decades.
