In the initial blitz of executive orders that kicked off President Donald Trump’s second term in January, the president addressed his promises related to immigration, DEI initiatives in government, and pardoning January 6 defendants. But on day four, he also addressed a more obscure obsession from the campaign trail, the outstanding classified documents from the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy and the subsequent investigations.
Nearly two months later, Trump announced that a collection of nearly 80,000 documents are set for release on Tuesday. “People have been waiting decades for this,” Trump said during a Monday visit to the Kennedy Center, the federal performing arts center erected in the late president’s honor. “I said during the campaign that I’d do it, and I’m a man of my word.”
According to ABC News, Trump’s announcement set off an all-night scramble at the Department of Justice’s National Security Division. An email from a senior official asked lawyers to provide a “second set of eyes” for the documents, following an initial FBI review.
JFK’s assassination, long the subject of conspiracy theories on the right and left, was the subject of multiple official investigations, and many records have been released following decades of FOIA requests and administration-led requests. The January 23 executive order aimed to declassify remaining records associated with Kennedy and the 1968 assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, the father of HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. At campaign events in 2023 and 2024, the youngest Kennedy returned to the subject of his uncle frequently, claiming that the CIA had played a role in his death.
Following the order, the FBI returned to the Central Records Complex where documents are being assembled, and in February, announced that it had recently discovered 2,400 new records related to the assassination. After the discovery, JFK archive expert Jefferson Morley told Vanity Fair that he thought Trump’s embrace of RFK Jr. on the 2024 campaign trail might help explain the assassination’s renewed political significance. “I never expected the JFK thing to be an issue in the 2024 campaign,” Morley said. “But I wasn’t surprised that Trump harnessed it, because he knows it’s like this symbolic thing that can work for him, and he doesn’t have to deliver on the details.”
Classified documents—and chaotic releases—are a recurring obsession in the new Trump administration. On February 27, the DOJ released a series of new files related to Jeffrey Epstein, the late financier and convicted pedophile, including previously released flight logs and an evidence list showing entries for 150 items. Following a lackluster reaction, Attorney General Pam Bondi told Fox News’ Mark Levin that she hoped for future releases of Epstein-related files, though she was told that no further documents exist.
“I kept saying, there has to be more. There has to be more,” Bondi said, per The Hill. “I was assured that’s it.”
