Washington: US President Donald Trump said that he will release 80,000 pages of unredacted files related to the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy (JFK) on Tuesday.
“We’re going to be releasing the JFK files, and that would be tomorrow,” Trump told reporters at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., where he attended a board meeting, Xinhua news agency reported.
“You got a lot of reading. I don’t believe we’re going to redact anything. I said, just don’t. But we’re going to be releasing the JFK files,” Trump said.
“People have been waiting for decades for this,” Trump added.
When asked if there would be a summary of the 80,000 pages of files, Trump replied, “No.”
JFK, the 35th president of the United States, was assassinated on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas, while riding in a motorcade. Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested for the murder, yet numerous conspiracy theories about the circumstances of Oswald’s dramatic death two days after the assassination remain prevalent even today.
In 1992, Congress required that all documents related to the assassinations be made available to the public within 25 years, by October 26, 2017.
In his first term as president starting January 2017, Trump accepted proposed redactions from executive departments and agencies, but ordered the continued re-evaluation of those remaining redactions.
Joe Biden, who succeeded Trump, issued subsequent certifications concerning these records in 2021, 2022, and 2023, which gave agencies additional time to review the documents and withhold information from public disclosure.
Biden’s press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said on June 30, 2023 that 99 per cent of records associated with JFK’s assassination were available for public consumption through the National Archives and Records Administration.
On January 23, Trump signed an executive order to declassify any remaining files from the assassinations of former President JFK, his brother Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK).
(IANS)
