March 18 (UPI) — President Donald Trump announced he will release 80,000 pages of unredacted federal files Tuesday afternoon about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
He made the statement while speaking with reporters Monday at the Kennedy Center in Washington.
“While we’re here, I thought it would be appropriate,” he said.
“I don’t believe we’re going to redact anything.”
Trump signed an executive order in January that instructed the director of national intelligence and attorney general to present a plan within 15 days to declassify about 2,400 federal documents related to the Nov. 22, 1963, assassination of Kenendy, who was riding in a motorcade in Dallas during a campaign trip when he was killed.
His death had become tied to several conspiracy theories that have suggested that the conclusion of the government’s official Warren Commission inquiry into the assassination that deemed Lee Harvey Oswald to have acted alone in killing Kennedy was possibly inaccurate, and perhaps even part of a cover-up.
More than 5 million pages of documents, which have been digitized, were transferred last month to the National Archives and Records Administration.
Congress enacted the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act in 1992, which required all related material to be kept in a single collection and publicly released within 25 years, with exceptions. The FBI said in 2022 that over 97% of records in the Kennedy collection are available to the American people but hasn’t stated what information is contained.
“I said during the campaign I’d do it, and I’m a man of my word,” Trump said Monday. Nearly 13,000 files from the records had been made available to the public by the National Archives in 2022.
When asked if he knew what information exists in the files, Trump said “I’ve heard about them. Going to be very interesting.”
