Is Trump Releasing all the JFK Records – Or Not?
The world is waiting...
Last week there was a very brief moment in which it looked like the newly inaugurated President Trump was finally going to allow the declassification of all the files relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. This has been decades in the waiting, and he had said clearly in interviews during the campaign and after his election that he was going to immediately release these records – of which there are around 3,000 today sitting in the National Archives and Records Administration In fact, in a Washington rally the night before his inauguration, Trump declared his administration will “reverse the overclassification of government documents, and in the coming days, we are going to make public remaining records relating to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert Kennedy, as well as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr and other topics of great public interest."
He then issued a much awaited Executive Order on January 16 that directs the DNI – Director of National Intelligence – and the attorney general to develop a plan within 15 days to release the remaining JFK records, and within 45 days a plan to release the RFK and MLK Jr. cases. But the response to this order has been deflation, not elation.
My guest today is going to explain what this order says, what it does, and why it wasn’t what we had exactly hoped for. He will also walk us through what has and has not been released already, what he is looking for in the remaining classified and redacted documents, and most importantly why it is critical that all of the government records of the assassination, before and after November 22, 1963, are finally made public.
Jefferson Morley is a Washington author and veteran journalist who has been writing for decades about the JFK assassination within the context of official secrecy in Washington’s intelligence agencies. He is the author of several non–fiction histories, the most recent being Scorpions Dance: The President, The Spymaster and Watergate (2022), and The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton (2017). He is the vice president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation and publishes a popular Substack newsletter called JFK Facts.
This week he previewed his own special edition, in which JFK Facts and the Mary Ferrell Foundation will be highlighting 12 essential documents believed to be covered in the Executive Order and how they might finally unlock the mysteries of the JFK assassination, including whether Harvey Lee Oswald was indeed the lone gunman, which is the official story of that day in Dallas, November 22, 1963.