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 visited the Cuban Consulate in Mexico City and contacted the Soviet Embassy there, ostensibly to arrange travel visas.
Less 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: “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.
