Jan. 23 (UPI) — Federal documents relating to several high-profile assassinations during the 1960s will become fully available to the public this year after President Donald Trump on Thursday ordered their release.
“More than 50 years after the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the federal government has not released to the public all of its records related to those events,” Trump said in an executive order declassifying the respective documents.
“Their families and the American people deserve transparency and truth,” Trump said. “It is in the national interest to finally release all records related to these assassinations without delay.”
The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Act of 1992 required the federal government to fully disclose all relevant records by Oct. 26, 2017.
The act enabled respective presidents to postpone the release of related information that might compromise national security, intelligence operations, law enforcement or foreign relations.
Trump and President Joe Biden allowed redactions of some of the information in the records and postponed the release of some documents.
“I have now determined that the continued redaction and withholding of information from records pertaining to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy is not consistent with the public interest,” Trump said in Thursday’s executive order. “The release of these records is long overdue.”
Trump gave the attorney general and director of national intelligence 15 days to present a plan for the full release of records relating to President Kennedy’s assassination.
They also have 45 days to present a plan to release documents related to the assassinations of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
After signing the executive order, Trump instructed an aide to give the pen he used to sign it to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom the president has nominated to be his Cabinet’s secretary of Health and Human Services, CBS News reported.
The majority of records related to President Kennedy’s assassination already have been made public, according to the National Archives and Records Administration.
About 97% of the 5 million pages related to the JFK assassination already were made public.
The executive order requires the release of 3,000 documents that have not been made public and the including of redactions in another 30,000 documents.
President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963; King was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968; and Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968.
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