Trump declassifies thousands of documents on Kennedy assassination

WashingtonAt seven o'clock in the evening in the United States this Tuesday, when the National Archives published 1,123 documents on the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, conspiracy theories about the death of the former president flooded the X platform – which has practically become a Trump bubble. President Donald Trump has decided to revoke a decision from his first term and has brought these papers to light without hidden and fenced parts. Some of the users who were eagerly waiting to be able to read the complete documents again complained on X that some pages were still illegible due to the handwriting or printing of the text.

The Internet has once again boiled with the conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination, although no major revelations are expected to be found among the thousands of pages that have been made public. The bulk of the National Archives' collection, which contains more than six million pages of records, images, audio and video recordings, and other items related to the assassination, have been previously released. The last major release of documents was in 2022, when the National Archives freed up nearly 13,000 new files.

Presidential historians said at the time that they didn't expect any major surprises with the release of this new batch, although it could shed light on some details about the November 22, 1963, assassination in Dallas, Texas. However, no new assassins are expected to be uncovered beyond the actual perpetrator: lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswald, who fired the deadly features against Kennedy's motorcade from the sixth floor of the Dallas School Book Depository.

During his 2024 campaign, Trump promised to declassify the remaining government documents on the Kennedy assassination, a topic that has always been marked by an aura of mystery regarding whether others were involved in the death of the 35th president, including the CIA itself. "I said during the campaign that I would do it, and I'm a man of my word," Trump said this Monday from the Kennedy Center in Washington when he announced the release of the documents for this Tuesday.

Finding valuable information will be a complicated and lengthy task. Not only because of the volume, but because the documents delivered have been published in a haphazard manner, without any categorization. Most of the PDF files were less than 10 pages. Furthermore, it has not been explained how many of the documents that have now been declassified are still pending digitization. According to the National Archives website, starting Tuesday, "as records are digitized, they will be posted on the site."

Some information remains blocked.

In January, Trump signed an executive order for the release of federal government documents related to the assassinations of Kennedy, former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. The order directed the Director of National Intelligence and the Attorney General to submit a plan within 15 days for the "full and complete release of files relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy." Despite this promise to release the files without any redactions, an initial review by the New York Times has detected that some information remains blocked.

Oswald, who killed Kennedy on November 22, 1963, was a former marine An unbalanced man who identified himself as a Marxist. Two days after assassinating the Democrat, Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby shot and killed Oswald just before he was to be transferred to a new prison.

In theory, by law, all documents related to the assassination were to be made public by October 26, 2017; although exceptions were provided if the president demonstrated that keeping them secret was necessary to prevent serious harm that outweighed the public interest in their disclosure. When the time came to make them public in 2017, Trump was president, and it was he who decreed that some of the documents would remain secret. Now he seems to forget and keeps showing himself to be a defender of transparency. Trump was only now able to declassify the documents because former President Joe Biden also renewed the classification of the records.