WASHINGTON — President Trump on Thursday ordered the declassification and release of long-secret files on the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert F. Kennedy and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.
“Everything will be revealed,” Trump, 78, said in the Oval Office as he signed an executive order mandating the disclosure — after decades of speculation and conspiracy theories about each of the slayings.
The order says “the release of these records is long overdue” and requires the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to rapidly prepare for the release.
Officials will have 15 days to “present a plan to the President for the full and complete release of records” on the JFK assassination and 45 days to do so for the RFK and MLK cases.
President Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963 in Dallas — with prime suspect Lee Harvey Oswald murdered himself two days later by nightclub owner Jack Ruby, spurring lasting debate about whether Oswald was part of — or a patsy in — a shadowy conspiracy.
Oswald, a Marine Corps veteran, defected to the Soviet Union four years before the assination and later returned to the US. In late September 1963, Oswald both visted the Cuban consulate in Mexico City and contacted the Soviet embassy there, ostensibly to arrange travel visas.
Fewer than two weeks before the assassination, Oswald wrote to the Soviet Embassy in Washington, complaining: “[H]ad I been able to reach the Soviet Embassy in Havana, as planned, the embassy there would have had time to complete our business.”
In a CIA document released in response to a separate order by Trump in 2017, an official wrote that: “Although it appears that [Oswald] was then thinking only about a peaceful change of residence to the Soviet Union, it is also possible that he was getting documented to make a quick escape after assassinating the president.”
Ruby’s own known links to organized crime have provided another breeding ground for JFK conspiracy theories.
Then-New York Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was shot dead by Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian Christian, in June 1968 — shortly after winning California’s Democratic presidential contest. Sirhan’s attorney at one point claimed he was framed.
Trump has nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to serve as his secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services and told an aide to give RFK Jr. the pen with which he signed Thursday’s order.
The younger Kennedy has argued in the past that the CIA was behind the murders of his father and his uncle, and argued — in opposition to his siblings, that Sirhan should be granted parole.
King was fatally shot in April 1968 by James Earl Ray after the FBI worked to undermine the minister’s anti-racial discrimination advocacy — including with an infamous 1964 letter that allegedly sought to push King into killing himself.
Investigators also reported in a bureau analysis dated March 12, 1968, 23 days before King’s murder, that the civil rights leader had an inordinate number of Communists in his inner circle.
The analysis noted that two of King’s former aides were Communist Party members, while eight others had communist affiliations.
The document also said that in the early 1960s, the Communist Party was trying to get a black labor coalition to further its goals in the United States, and argued that King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference were “made to order” for the purpose.
The report added that a black minister who attended a King-hosted workshop to train ministers held in February 1968 in Miami “expressed his disgust with the behind-the-scene [sic] drinking, fornication and homosexuality that went on at the conference.”
“Throughout the ensuing years and until this date,” the FBI analysis said, “King has continued to carry on his sexual aberrations secretly while holding himself out to public view as a moral leader of religious conviction.”
