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President Trump announced that he’ll declassify any remaining files from the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. He signed an executive order at the White House Thursday.
After an aide announced the president was signing the executive action “ordering the declassification of files relating to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and Dr. Reverend Martin Luthern King Jr.,” Mr. Trump said, “That’s a big one, huh? A lot of people are waiting for this for a long — for years, for decades.”
The president instructed his aide to give the pen he used to sign the order to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the son of the Robert F. Kennedy and Mr. Trump’s nominee to run the Department of Health and Human Services. The elder Kennedy was the former attorney general, New York senator and a Democratic presidential candidate when he was slain in 1968.
After a release of some of the JFK files in 2022, the National Archives and Records Administration said 97% of the roughly 5 million pages in its collection related to the assassination were public.
The president promised during his first administration in 2017 that he would release the remaining JFK files. That included some 3,000 documents that had never been made public and 30,000 that had been previously released with redactions, but not all of the files were made public during his first term.
In 1992, Congress mandated that all assassination documents were to be released within 25 years.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
Stefan Becket is a managing editor of politics for CBSNews.com. Stefan has covered national politics for more than a decade and helps oversee a team covering the White House, Congress, the Supreme Court, immigration and federal law enforcement.
