US president says files contain ‘a lot of reading’ about assassination that has fuelled conspiracy theories for decades.
United States President Donald Trump has said his administration will on Tuesday release approximately 80,000 pages of files about the assassination of John F Kennedy, whose killing has fuelled conspiracy theories for more than six decades.
Speaking at the Kennedy Center on Monday, Trump said the release will contain “a lot of reading” about the assassination of the 35th US president, who was killed in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963.
“I don’t believe we are going to redact anything. I said, ‘just don’t redact, you can’t redact’,” Trump told reporters. “But we are going to be releasing the JFK files.”
Asked if he had seen what was in the files, Trump said he was aware of their contents.
“It’s going to be very interesting,” he said.
Trump’s remarks follow a January executive order calling for the release of all remaining records on the JFK assassination, as well as files related to the assassinations of Robert F Kennedy and the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.
Under the order, Trump instructed the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, to present a plan within 15 days for the “full and complete release” of files on the JFK assassination.
Last month, the FBI said that searches it had undertaken to comply with the order had turned up about 2,400 new files related to the assassination.
The circumstances of JFK’s death have captivated US society for decades, with surveys showing a majority of Americans doubt official explanations of the case.
In a 2023 Gallup poll, 65 percent of Americans said they did not accept the Warren Commission’s finding that Lee Harvey Oswald, a US Marine veteran arrested over JFK’s death, acted alone in killing the president.
Twenty percent of those surveyed said they believed Oswald conspired with the US government, while 16 percent said they thought that he worked with the CIA.
During his first administration, Trump promised to disclose all outstanding records on the assassination but ultimately only released about 2,800 documents after the CIA and FBI requested that thousands of pages of material be withheld pending review.
Former US President Joe Biden’s administration released about 17,000 more records, leaving fewer than 4,700 files withheld in part or in full.
According to the National Archives, authorities have released more than 99 percent of the approximately 320,000 documents reviewed under the 1992 JFK Records Act.
The law mandated the disclosure of all remaining files by October 26, 2017, unless the president determined their release would cause “identifiable harm” to national defence, intelligence operations, law enforcement or foreign relations of such gravity that it “outweighs the public interest in disclosure”.