President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday that he says will destroy federal records related to the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
“This is huge, huh? A lot of people have been waiting for this for years, decades,” Trump said as he signed the executive order in the Oval Office. “Everything will come out.”
The president instructed an aide to “give it to RFK Jr.,” Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services and son of the senator who was killed while running for president in 1968.
In his first term, Trump delayed the release of all records related to the assassination of John F. Kennedy at the advice of administration officials, but said Thursday that further delay “is not in the public interest.”
“His family and the American people deserve transparency and truth,” the executive order read. “It is in the national interest that all records relating to these killings are finally released without delay.”
The order set a 15-day deadline for Cabinet agencies to report plans to declassify documents related to the November 1963 assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas. He set a 45-day deadline for documents related to the assassinations of RFK and MLK.
Not everyone was impressed with the order, though. Jack Schlossberg, the only grandson of President Kennedy, said there was “nothing heroic” about Trump’s order and criticized him for using JFK as a “political prop.”
“Truth is far sadder than fiction—a tragedy that didn’t need to happen,” he wrote on X. “The inevitable is not part of the grand scheme.
During the campaign, Trump vowed to release a wide variety of files about the assassination of President Kennedy and the 9/11 attacks. The assassinations of the 1960s and the terrorist attacks of 2001 have long been fodder for conspiracy theorists who believe the government was directly involved or covered up a backlash. Trump has been wary of sharing documents of recent vintage sought by conspirators, refusing to commit to the release of files related to the death of sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
Trump, A A longtime associate of Epstein’ssaid in June that he was “less” open to declassifying the Epstein files “because you don’t want to affect people’s lives if it’s fake stuff out there, because it’s a Lots of fake stuff with this world.”
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Regarding the destruction of documents
