President Donald Trump has made good on his pledge for transparency, going through with the release of secret documents related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Roughly 80,000 pages of previously-classified records are being published with no redactions in compliance with an executive order signed by Trump, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) said in a press release on Tuesday. Trump had announced the plan for disclosure on Monday while touring the Kennedy Center.
“President Trump is ushering in a new era of maximum transparency. Today, per his direction, previously redacted JFK Assassination Files are being released to the public with no redactions. Promises made, promises kept,” Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said in a post on X.
ODNI said the records will be available to access either online starting on Tuesday or “via hard copy or on analog media formats, accessible to the American people” at the National Archives at College Park, Maryland. “Records that are currently only available for in-person viewing are being digitized and will be uploaded to the” repository on the National Archives website in the “coming days,” the agency noted.
Gabbard will post updates to X and Trump’s Truth Social as the files are released, said ODNI, which added that the files will also be posted on the White House’s website.
ODNI said additional documents “withheld under court seal or for grand jury secrecy, and records subject to section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code, must be unsealed before release.” It noted that the National Archives is “working with the Department of Justice to expedite the unsealing of these records. Grand juries from many years ago have already seen them, so most of this information is already out, but regardless of this, this information will be immediately released upon the direction of the Court.”
Kennedy was assassinated at the age of 46 on November 22, 1963, in Dallas. Soon after, Lee Harvey Oswald, a former Marine and onetime defector to the Soviet Union, was arrested and charged with the killings of Kennedy and Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit. Although Oswald denied killing Kennedy and claimed he was a “patsy,” he was never tried — Oswald was shot dead at the age of 24 on national television at the Dallas Police headquarters by nightclub owner Jack Ruby.
The Warren Commission, established in 1963 by President Lyndon B. Johnson, concluded that Oswald acted alone. However, doubts lingered and The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 was signed into law by former President George H.W. Bush. Multiple delays in document disclosures happened since that time, giving room for conspiracy theories about Kennedy’s death to remain nearly 60 years later.
Trump oversaw the release of some documents during his first term in office, but declined to go through with a full disclosure while citing “identifiable national security, law enforcement, and foreign affairs concerns.” President Joe Biden also held off on making a full disclosure. The National Archives said in December of 2022 that over 97% of the collection of about 5 million pages had been made available to the public.
In 2023, Trump pledged that he would release all the JFK assassination files if re-elected to the White House. After returning to office — in January — Trump signed an order to declassify the assassination files of JFK, his brother and former U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. RFK’s son, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is now serving as Trump’s secretary of Health and Human Services.
