Follow-up Measures After Executive Order on "Disclosure of Unreleased Documents" Issued Immediately After Inauguration
U.S. President Donald Trump announced on the 17th that he will release all undisclosed files related to the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy on the 18th (local time).
According to NBC and others, President Trump made the announcement during a visit to the Kennedy Center, a prominent cultural and arts venue in Washington, D.C., saying, "We will release all Kennedy files tomorrow," and added, "I have instructed several people led by Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Avril Haines to do so."
He continued, "We have an enormous amount of documents, and you will have a lot of material to read," and said, "We believe nothing will be deleted. I told them, 'Just don't delete anything.'"
When asked if a summary would be prepared, President Trump replied, "Absolutely not. I do not do summaries," and added, "You write the summary yourself. It's about 80,000 pages." He further stated, "Many people have been waiting for decades. The materials will be very interesting."
Earlier, President Trump had pledged during the presidential campaign to release all documents related to the assassination of former President Kennedy. In particular, this release is a follow-up to the directive issued through an executive order on January 23, after the start of his second term in office, to disclose the classified materials.
In the meantime, various conspiracy theories have circulated in American society regarding the background of the Kennedy assassination. In response, President Trump also ordered the release of government classified documents related to two other individuals assassinated in the 1960s: former Senator Robert F. Kennedy, the brother of President Kennedy and father of Robert Kennedy Jr., who serves as Secretary of Health and Human Services in Trump's second administration, and civil rights activist Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
Former President Kennedy was shot and killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, a former U.S. Marine, on November 22, 1963, while riding in a motorcade with his wife Jacqueline Kennedy in downtown Dallas, Texas. Former Senator Kennedy was fatally shot on June 5, 1968, by Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian immigrant, and Reverend King was assassinated on April 4 of the same year in Memphis, Tennessee.
Regarding this, in 2023, the U.S. National Archives announced that after reviewing the classified documents related to Kennedy's assassination, 99% of the records had already been released. However, CNN reported that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) stated that after President Trump's executive order, they discovered 2,400 new records related to the case.
© The Asia Business Daily(www.asiae.co.kr). All rights reserved.
