FBI says it found 2,400 new records related to JFK assassination

Washington — The FBI said Monday that it discovered roughly 2,400 records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy during a search stemming from President Trump’s executive action ordering files related to the 1963 killing to be declassified.

The bureau said that the newly found documents, which have been inventoried and digitized, “were previously unrecognized as related to the JFK assassination case file.” The FBI said it made the appropriate notifications of the records and is working to transfer them to the National Archives and Records Administration to be included in the declassification process that has been ongoing. The bureau did not say what the records contain.

Mr. Trump signed an executive order on his first week in office that called for the declassification of files related to the assassinations of Kennedy, his brother Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.

The order gave the director of national intelligence and attorney general 15 days to present a plan to the president for the “full and complete release of records” related to Kennedy’s assassination.

Congress in 1992 enacted the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, which required all assassination-related material be kept in a single collection within the National Archives and be publicly released. The law gave federal agencies 25 years to process and disclose the documents, with exceptions. The collection at the National Archives consists of more than 5 million pages of records.

The National Archives has over the last three decades made material related to Kennedy’s assassination available to the public, with the latest batch disclosed in August 2023. The agency said in December 2022 that more than 97% of records in its Kennedy collection are available to the American people.