More than 60 years after President John F. Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas, the federal government on Tuesday began releasing what could be the final trove of documents delving into the assassination that shocked the nation and spawned countless conspiracy theories.
The National Archives and Records Administration started posting the long-awaited files just before 7 p.m. — a day after President Donald Trump announced that 80,000 pages related to the fatal shooting on Nov. 22, 1963, were about to be released.
“In accordance with President Donald Trump’s directive of March 17, 2025, all records previously withheld for classification that are part of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection are released,” the administration’s statement read.
Within minutes, thousands of documents that had been hidden from the public for decades appeared on the site.
It wasn’t immediately clear whether the trove of documents contains any bombshells or evidence to counter the conclusion the Warren Commission reached in 1964 that a lone gunman named Lee Harvey Oswald fired the fatal shots from the Texas Schoolbook Depository.
“You got a lot of reading,” Trump said Monday as he visited the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. “I don’t believe we’re going to redact anything.”
Trump was cagey about what would be in those files. Historians contend that around 4,700 documents haven’t yet been released.
“The origins of the 80,000 pages of material are unknown,” Jefferson Morley, an expert on the JFK assassination and the CIA, wrote on his “JFK Facts” blog before the new batch of documents was released.
Justice Department lawyers worked all night to review hundreds of pages of classified documents before they were released, a person familiar with the matter told NBC News.
It also remained to be seen whether the document drop would finally put to rest the widespread public skepticism of the government’s official explanation that Oswald acted alone.
“People have so many doubts,” presidential historian Michael Beschloss said. “There are so many theories that are conflicting. It’s very hard for me to imagine that there will be one piece of evidence that will make everyone agree on what happened here. What most people do agree is that the killing of John Kennedy changed history, and mainly in a bad way.”
When Trump was campaigning last year and trying to win the endorsement of JFK’s nephew Robert F. Kennedy Jr., he renewed his promise to release the files.
President John F. Kennedy, first lady Jacqueline Kennedy, Texas Gov. John Connally and others smile at the crowds lining their motorcade route in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. Minutes later, the president was assassinated as his car passed through Dealey Plaza.Bettmann Archive
Hours after he snagged RFK Jr.’s endorsement in August, Trump vowed that if elected, he would establish a commission on assassination attempts in honor of RFK Jr., who is now his secretary of health and human services.
Shortly after he began his second term, Trump signed an executive order mandating the release of all records related to President Kennedy’s assassination, as well as the 1968 assassinations of RFK Jr.’s father, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy Sr., and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Under the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, all the documents related to the assassination were supposed to have been released by 2017, when Trump was president the first time.
Trump released some JFK-related documents then, but he also gave the intelligence agencies more time to assess the remaining files.
It wasn’t until December 2022 that President Joe Biden released more than 13,000 records after the Mary Ferrell Foundation, the country’s largest nonprofit repository of JFK assassination records, sued the administration to make all the documents public.
But Biden released only about 98% of all the documents related to the killing that remained in the National Archives, which controls the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection.
“It’s high time that the government got its act together and obeyed the spirit and the letter of the law,” Morley, who is also the vice president of the nonpartisan Mary Ferrell Foundation, said at the time.
“This is about our history and our right to know it,” he said.
The 4,700 or so records that were kept under wraps were believed to have included more information about accused Oswald’s sojourn in Mexico City before the assassination.
Among those documents were 44 related to CIA agent George Joannides and a covert Cuba-related program he ran that came into contact with Oswald less than four months before Kennedy was shot, according to calculations made by JFK researchers with the Mary Ferrell Foundation.
In a memorandum explaining why some documents weren’t being released, Biden noted that the records act “permits the continued postponement of disclosure of information … only when postponement remains necessary to protect against an identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or the conduct of foreign relations that is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure.”
Prominent historians didn’t buy that explanation.
“We’re 59 years after President John Kennedy was killed, and there’s just no justification for this,” U.S. District Judge John Tunheim, who chaired the Assassination Records Review Board from 1994 to 1998, said when Biden released the records.
