The US President, Donald Trump, signed an order on Thursday to release remaining government documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, as well as those connected to the murders of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s.
Trump told journalists present at the event, “This is a big thing. Many people have been waiting for this for years, for decades. Everything will be revealed.”
According to US media, the Director of National Intelligence is expected to submit a plan for the “complete release”of the JFK assassination files within 15 days and a plan for the release of the RFK and MLK assassination files within 45 days.
Trump had already announced his plan at a rally in the Capital One Arena in Washington over the weekend, where he delivered a speech to an audience of around 20,000 people (RT DE reported).
The political murders of President Kennedy in 1963, his brother and political ally Robert in 1968 and Martin Luther King, the civil rights leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner, in the same year, have been the subject of controversial perceptions and speculations in America for decades.
The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) alone possesses five million files related to the assassination of President Kennedy. In the 1990s, the government had ordered the almost complete release of the files by October 2017, although every president has the authority to make exceptions. This was regulated by the “John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992”.
Between 3,000 and 4,000 potentially revealing documents can now be released. Trump had made a similar promise during his first term in 2017 and eventually allowed the release of documents, but held a significant portion of them back, citing “national security concerns”a move described as pressure from the CIA and FBI at the time.