



President Donald Trump made good on a campaign promise as 80,000 pages of files connected to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy have started to be released.
It was not immediately clear how many of the files are among the millions of pages of records that have already been made public. However, Fox News reports that because of the sheer size of the documents being released, it will take a few days to fully release the files.
As of Tuesday, records were made available to access online or in person at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. The records will continue to be digitized and posted on the National Archives website.
In total, 1,123 PDF files were released on Tuesday, with most of them relating to the initial investigation in 1964 of the assassination.
Larry J. Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics and author of “The Kennedy Half-Century,” said he had a team start going through the documents but it might be some time before their full significance becomes clear.
“We have a lot of work to do for a long time to come, and people just have to accept that,” he said.
Many of the documents released are administrative records related to the Warren Commission — the records of the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy.
The compilation includes information from federal agencies, photos and recordings, as well as commission hearings on the assassination.
Kennedy was fatally shot in 1963 while riding in an open motorcade in Dallas. Police arrested 24-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald, who had positioned himself from a sniper’s perch on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository building. Just days later, nightclub owner Jack Ruby fatally shot Oswald during a jail transfer.
The president’s death has been the subject of conspiracy theories for decades with some persisting about alleged CIA involvement or the existence of another shooter. A year after the assassination, the Warren Commission, established by President Lyndon B. Johnson, concluded Oswald acted alone and there was no evidence of a conspiracy.
The last large document drop came in 2022 when the National Archives released nearly 13,000 new files related to the assassination.
The Justice Department’s National Security Division has been working around the clock to meet Trump’s promise, according to ABC News. The outlet reports the National Security Division also shifted resources to focus on the documents.
A senior official within DOJ’s Office of Intelligence told ABC that even though the FBI had already conducted “an initial declassification review” of the documents, “all” of the attorneys in the operations section needed to provide “a second set of eyes.” Eventually, however, it was other National Security Division attorneys who ended up having to help, sources said.
It was reported the FBI found 2,400 new files on the Kennedy assassination in February after Trump’s order. Researchers have estimated that 3,000 or so files had not been released, either in whole or in part.
Trump announced release of the files, which he said he believed wouldn’t be redacted, on Monday during a visit to the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts.
“People have been waiting decades for this and I’ve instructed my people that are responsible, lots of different people, put together by Tulsi Gabbard, and that’s going to be released tomorrow,” Trump said Monday. “We have a tremendous amount of paper, you’ve got a lot of reading. I don’t believe we’re going to redact anything. I said ‘Just don’t redact, you can’t redact.'”
According to Fox News, some redactions were made to the documents, a source familiar told the outlet. Redactions include personal information like Social Security numbers of those cited in the documents and “live assets in Cuba,” the source said.
In February, the House Oversight Committee announced a task force charged with declassifying federal documents related to the deaths of Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and former Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. Trump also signed an executive order calling for a plan to release the documents by March 9.
During an interview with Full Measure’s Sharyl Attkisson, Trump said he had received internal government pushback against his plan to release the files publicly.
Some of the documents already released explained the way intelligence services operated at the time, including CIA cables and memos discussing visits by Oswald to the Soviet and Cuban embassies during a trip to Mexico City just weeks before the assassination.
One CIA memo describes how Oswald phoned the Soviet embassy while in Mexico City to ask for a visa to visit the Soviet Union. He also visited the Cuban embassy, apparently interested in a travel visa that would permit him to visit Cuba and wait there for a Soviet visa. On Oct. 3, more than a month before the assassination, he drove to Texas through a crossing point at the border.
Another memo, dated the day after Kennedy’s assassination, says that according to an intercepted phone call in Mexico City, Oswald communicated with a KGB officer while at the Soviet embassy that September.
Congress passed legislation in 1992 requiring all remaining government records about the assassination to be released by October 2017, unless they posed certain risks to national defense or intelligence. Both Trump and former President Joe Biden issued extensions to keep certain documents private.
Editor’s note: The Associated Press contributed to this report.