- President Trump announced that approximately 80,000 pages related to the 1963 assassination of JFK will be released Tuesday afternoon, with no redactions. Trump said he hasn’t read the files but expects them to be “very interesting.”
- The files were compiled under the guidance of Tulsi Gabbard, who serves as Trump’s director of national intelligence.
- In January, Trump signed an executive order declassifying documents related to the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
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President Donald Trump announced that approximately 80,000 pages related to President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination will be released Tuesday, March 18.
Trump made the announcement Monday evening, March 17, while visiting the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
“While we’re here, I thought it would be appropriate –– we are tomorrow announcing and giving all of the Kennedy files,” Trump told reporters. “So people have been waiting for decades for this, and I’ve instructed my people that are responsible, lots of different people, put together by Tulsi Gabbard, and that’s gonna be released tomorrow.”
The president added there will be no redactions.
“We have a tremendous amount of paper,” Trump said. “You’ve got a lot of reading. I don’t believe we’re going to redact anything. I said, ‘Just don’t redact; you can’t redact.’ But we’re going to be releasing the JFK files and that would be tomorrow.”
Trump signed an executive order on his third day back in office, ordering the declassification of files related to the assassinations of Kennedy, his brother, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, and civil rights icon Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
During his first term, Trump said he wanted the remaining files released. However, he signed a memo in 2018 stating the federal government would continue withholding the information due to national security concerns.
Former CIA Director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who served during Trump’s first administration, was asked about keeping the documents secret two years ago while appearing on the John Stossel podcast.
“I had a chance to see not all of those documents but most of them,” Pompeo said. “The news value of them is grossly overrated, and the desire to keep them secret, the motivation, the rationale of keeping them secret is wholly justified.”
Trump says he hasn’t read the files yet but has heard about them and says “it’s going to be very interesting.”
