President Donald Trump announced on Monday evening that today, March 18, some 80,000 documents concerning President John F. Kennedy’s death will be made public. Last January Trump signed an executive order declassifying the files on the killings of JFK, his brother Robert, and civil rights leader Martin Luther King.
Last month the FBI announced that it had found some 2,400 new documents relating to President Kennedy’s assassination, but without releasing information about their content.
JFK’s assassination has fueled conspiracy theories for decades. Kennedy was shot dead in downtown Dallas as his motorcade passed the Texas School Book Depository, where 24-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald had positioned himself on the sixth floor with his firearm.
Two days later, nightclub owner Jack Ruby killed Oswald during his transfer to prison. At the time, it was determined that the young killer acted alone and that there was no evidence of a conspiracy against the U.S. president.
However, the outcome of the investigation has left many sceptical about the reputed findings. Documents published in recent years have offered details about how the intelligence services operated at the time. These include a CIA memo about Oswald’s visits to the Soviet and Cuban embassies during a trip to Mexico City a few weeks before the assassination.
During in his first term as president Trump promised the release of all documents regarding the assassination. At the time, however, the MAGA leader heeded the recommendations of the CIA and FBI, which asked him not to release some of these files into the public domain, due to national security concerns.
Now, however, it would appear that this is set to change. “We have a tremendous amount of paper, you’ve got a lot of reading,” Trump said, “I don’t believe we’re going to redact anything. I said ‘just don’t redact, you can’t redact.’ People have been waiting decades for this and I’ve instructed my people that are responsible, lots of different people, put together by Tulsi Gabbard.”
