President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday which he says would declassify federal records surrounding the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
"That's a big one, huh? A lot of people have been waiting for this for years, for decades," Trump said in the Oval Office while signing the order. "Everything will be revealed."
The president directed an aide to “give that to RFK Jr.,” Trump’s pick to lead the Health and Human Services department and the son of the senator who was killed while running for president in 1968.
In his first term, Trump delayed releasing all records on John F. Kennedy’s assassination on the advice of administration officials, but said on Thursday that further delays are “not consistent with the public interest.”
“Their families and the American people deserve transparency and truth,” the executive order read. “It is in the national interest to finally release all records related to these assassinations without delay.”
The order set a 15-day deadline for Cabinet agencies to report a plan for declassifying documents related to President Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas in November 1963. It set a 45-day deadline for documents related to RFK and MLK’s assassinations.
Not everyone was impressed by the order, though. Jack Schlossberg, President Kennedy’s sole grandson, said there was “nothing heroic about” Trump’s order and slammed him for using JFK as a "political prop.”
"The truth is a lot sadder than the myth — a tragedy that didn’t need to happen," he wrote on X. "Not part of an inevitable grand scheme.
Trump vowed on the campaign trail to declassify broad swaths of files on President Kennedy’s killing and the 9/11 attacks. The '60s assassinations and the 2001 terrorist attack have long been fodder for conspiracy theorists who believe the government was involved, either directly or in a retroactive cover-up. Trump was cagier about sharing documents of more recent vintage craved by conspiracists, declining to commit to the release of files related to the death of sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
Trump, a a long-time associate of Epstein's, said 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 phony stuff in there, because it's a lot of phony stuff with that world.”
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