The Associated Press’ Jamie Stengle
Dallas (AP) The 1963 killing of President John F. Kennedy has been the subject of conspiracy theories for decades, and President Donald Trump has ordered the release of thousands of classified government records about it.
Declassifying the remaining federal documents connected to the assassinations of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy is another goal of the executive order that Trump issued on Thursday.Trump has swiftly taken a number of executive measures in the first week of his second term, including this order.
“Everything will be revealed,” Trump told reporters.
During his reelection campaign, Trump pledged to release the final sets of classified records related to the Dallas assassination of President Kennedy, which has fascinated people for decades. Trump made a similar promise during his first term, but he eventually complied with the FBI’s and CIA’s requests to retain certain materials.
FILE: On May 9, 1963, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. addresses reporters in Birmingham, Alabama. (AP Image)AP
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Kennedy’s nephew, has been nominated by Trump to serve as his next administration’s health secretary. In 1968, Robert F. Kennedy, Kennedy’s father, was slain while vying for the Democratic presidential nomination. The younger Kennedy has stated that he does not believe that his uncle, President Kennedy, was assassinated in 1963 by a single gunman.
According to the order, the attorney general and the director of national intelligence must come up with a strategy to reveal the remaining John F. Kennedy data within 15 days, and the other two cases within 45 days. The real release date of the records was unclear.
Trump instructed an aide to deliver the pen used to sign the order to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Of the millions of official documents pertaining to President Kennedy’s assassination, just a few thousand have not yet been completely declassified. The public should not expect any shocking disclosures, according to many who have examined what has been made public thus far, but there is still a great deal of curiosity in the specifics of the assassination and the circumstances surrounding it.
According to Larry J. Sabato, author of The Kennedy Half-Century and director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, there is always a chance that something will elude detection and turn out to be the revealing tip of a much larger iceberg. That’s what scientists search for. Although the likelihood is that you won’t locate it, it might exist.
FILE: On March 16, 1968, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, D-N.Y., declares he would run for president while speaking in Washington. (AP Image)AP
On November 22, 1963, when his motorcade passed in front of the Texas School Book Depository building, where 24-year-old assassin Lee Harvey Oswald had set up shop from a sixth-floor sniper’s perch, Kennedy was shot and killed in downtown Dallas. Oswald was shot dead by nightclub owner Jack Ruby during a jail transfer two days after Kennedy was slain.
The National Archives and Records Administration was required by the federal government to compile all assassination-related records into a single collection at the beginning of the 1990s. Except in cases where the president granted an exemption, the collection of more than 5 million records has to be opened by 2017.
The order states that while there is no congressional provision that mandates the public release of information regarding the assassinations of King and Robert F. Kennedy, it is also in the public interest for those government data to be made available.
Trump said during his first term that he would permit the publication of all the remaining documents related to the president’s killing, but he ultimately withheld some due to what he described as the “possible harm to national security.”Additionally, certain files are remained hidden even though President Joe Biden has continued to make them public.
The majority of researchers concur that some 3,000 records have not yet been made public, either in full or in part, and many of those data started with the CIA, according to Sabato, who instructs student researchers to go through the documents.
CIA cables and memoranda describing Oswald’s trips to the Soviet and Cuban embassies during a trip to Mexico City just weeks prior to the assassination are among the papers that have been made public in recent years and provide insight into the manner in which intelligence services functioned at the time. Prior to coming back to Texas, the former Marine had deserted to the Soviet Union.
In 1968, King and Robert F. Kennedy were slain two months apart.
FILE: First lady Jacqueline Kennedy, right, Nellie Connally, second from left, and her husband, Texas Governor John Connally, far left, follow President John F. Kennedy as he waves from his vehicle during a motorcade in Dallas on November 22, 1963. (File: Jim Altgens/AP Photo)AP
On April 4, 1968, King was outside a motel in Memphis, Tennessee, when gunfire broke out. Marches and other peaceful demonstrations were to be led by the civil rights activist, who had been in town to support striking sanitation workers. Less than an hour later, he passed away in a hospital.
James Earl Ray entered a guilty plea to King’s murder. However, he eventually withdrew his plea and insisted on his innocence until the end.
FBI documents released over the years show how the bureau wiretapped King s telephone lines, bugged his hotel rooms and used informants to get information against him. The recent documentary, MLK/FBI, focused on the agency’s actions.
Robert F. Kennedy, then a New York senator, was fatally shot on June 5, 1968, at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles moments after giving his victory speech for winning California s Democratic presidential primary. His assassin,Sirhan Sirhan, was convicted of first-degree murder and is serving life in prison.
There are still some documents in the JFK collection though that researchers don t believe the president will be able to release. The 2017 disclosure obligation did not apply to almost 500 documents, including tax returns. And, researchers note, documents have also been destroyed over the decades.
Associated Press writer Terry Tang contributed to this report from Phoenix.
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