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Previously classified documents related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy were released Wednesday following an order by President Donald Trump shortly after he took office.
The documents were posted on the website of the US National Archives and Records Administration. The vast majority of the National Archives' collection of over 6 million pages of records, photographs, motion pictures, sound recordings and artifacts related to the assassination have previously been released.
Trump told reporters Monday that has administration will be releasing 80,000 files, though it's not clear how many of those are among the millions of pages of records that have already been made public.
"We have a tremendous amount of paper. You've got a lot of reading," Trump said while visiting the John F. Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts in Washington.
Researchers have estimated that 3000 records or so hadn't been released, either in whole or in part. And last month, the FBI said that it had discovered about 2400 new records related to the assassination.
Secret servicemen standing on running boards follow the presidential limousine carrying President John F. Kennedy, in 1963. (Source: Associated Press)
Many who have studied what’s been released so far by the government say the public shouldn’t anticipate any earth-shattering revelations from the newly released documents, but there is still intense interest in details related to the assassination and the events surrounding it.
Trump's January order directed the national intelligence director and attorney general to develop a plan to release the records.
Kennedy was killed on November 22, 1963, on a visit to Dallas. As his motorcade was finishing its parade route downtown, shots rang out from the Texas School Book Depository building. Police arrested 24-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald, who had positioned himself from a sniper's perch on the sixth floor. Two days later, nightclub owner Jack Ruby fatally shot Oswald during a jail transfer.
Part of a file, dated November 24, 1963, quoting FBI director J. Edgar Hoover as he talks about the death of Lee Harvey Oswald, is photographed in Washington in 2017. (Source: Associated Press)
A year after the assassination, the Warren Commission, which President Lyndon B. Johnson established to investigate, concluded that Oswald acted alone and that there was no evidence of a conspiracy. But that didn’t quell a web of alternative theories over the decades.
In the early 1990s, the federal government mandated that all assassination-related documents be housed in a single collection in the National Archives and Records Administration. The collection was required to be opened by 2017, barring any exemptions designated by the president.
Trump, who took office for his first term in 2017, had said that he would allow the release of all of the remaining records but ended up holding some back because of what he called the potential harm to national security. And while files continued to be released during President Joe Biden’s administration, some remained unseen.
