An executive order signed by President Trump on Thursday calls for making thousands of documents related to the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. public. "Lot of people are waiting for this a long, for years, for decades," Trump said, per CNN. "Give that to RFK Jr.," his pick to run the Department of Health and Human Services, the president said when he finished with one pen. Another Kennedy descendant immediately criticized Trump's decision. "There's nothing heroic about it," Jack Schlossberg, JFK's grandson, posted on X.
Many of the documents connected to the JFK assassination have already been declassified, including 13,000 released during the Biden administration, though plenty have been have been redacted. Trump's order gives the director of national intelligence and the attorney general 45 days to come up with a plan for releasing all RFK and King files, per CBS News. They're given 15 days on the JFK files, though neither office has been filled yet. President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, and RFK and King in 1968. "Everything will be revealed," Trump told reporters at the signing, the Guardian reports.
Trump promised to release the files during the campaign. He said that in his first campaign but reversed once in office. The CIA, Pentagon, and State Department have held back files, saying it's mostly to protect the identities of confidential sources who are still alive and safeguard the agencies' methods, per CNN. Schlossberg suggested Thursday that people looking for evidence of conspiracy theories will be disappointed. "The truth is a lot sadder than the myth—a tragedy that didn't need to happen. Not part of an inevitable grand scheme," Schlossberg posted, saying that "declassification is using JFK as a political prop, when he's not here to punch back." (More President Trump stories.)
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