Around 2,400 records associated with President John F Kennedy’s assassination have been discovered by the FBI, with these documents never being provided to a board that was tasked with reviewing and disclosing the records.
According to Axios, the records were found in 14,000 pages of documents the FBI discovered in a review that was triggered by an executive order signed by President Trump on January 23 that demands the release of all JFK assassination records. The existence of the new documents was revealed to the White House on Friday by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence when it submitted its plan for the disclosure of the assassination records under the order.
"This is huge. It shows the FBI is taking this seriously," Jefferson Morely, vice president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, told Axios. "The FBI is finally saying, 'Let's respond to the president's order,' instead of keeping the secrecy going."
Under the 1992 JFK Records Act, records linked to the assassination were supposed to be handed over to the JFK Assassination Records Review Board and then to the National Archives. The documents were supposed to be fully disclosed in 2017, however, Trump, under his first term, delayed the disclosure of the records on the advice of the CIA. President Biden ordered the limited release of some records. This latest discovery of documents was of ones that had not been submitted to the review board.
According to those who discussed the matter with him, Trump reportedly regretted not releasing all the JFK records in his first term. On the 2024 campaign trail, Trump promised to release the records on the assassination, as well as those linked to the 1968 killing of Robert F Kennedy.
On January 23, Trump signed an executive order on the declassification of the JFK, RFK and Martin Luther King Jr files. "I have now determined that the continued redaction and withholding of information from records pertaining to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy is not consistent with the public interest and the release of these records is long overdue. And although no Act of Congress directs the release of information pertaining to the assassinations of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I have determined that the release of all records in the Federal Government’s possession pertaining to each of those assassinations is also in the public interest."
