WASHINGTON ― President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday released what it said were all of the government’s classified files on the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, making thousands of pages of records available to the public for the first time.
The release of the files comes after Trump signed a day one executive order in January aimed at fully releasing government documents related to the assassinations of Kennedy, his brother and presidential candidate Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, D-N.Y., and civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.
The contents of the documents, and whether any previously unreleased information is in them, wasn’t immediately clear. USA TODAY will continue reviewing the files and updating this story.
“This could be a joke of a release, or it could be a breakthrough. We just won’t know until we have time to process them,” said Jefferson Morley, author of the JFK Facts newsletter and three books on the CIA that portray the agency’s involvement in the events leading up to the assassination.
The documents are not expected to change the long-held findings that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assassinating Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963 while riding in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas.
‘Not all documents posted online Tuesday night’
The documents were released just before 7 p.m.
The National Archives and Records Administration, the keeper of the documents, posted them with this statement:
“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 National Archives said it partnered with agencies across the federal government to comply with the President’s directive in support of Executive Order 14176. It said the records are available to access either online or in person, via hard copy or on analog media formats, at the National Archives at College Park, Maryland.
“As the records continue to be digitized, they will be posted to this page,” the National Archives said, suggesting that not all of the documents were being released on Tuesday in digital form.
The National Archives also said some information might still be withheld under court seal or for grand jury secrecy, and because some tax return information is subject to Internal Revenue Code prohibitions.
More: Trump’s release of assassination docs opens window into nation’s most debated mysteries
‘People have been waiting for decades for this’
The digital document dump came one day after Trump announced the files would be released during a visit to the John F. Kennedy Center of the Performing Arts, which he’s taken over as board chairman.
“People have been waiting for decades for this,” Trump told reporters.
“We have a tremendous amount of paper. You’ve got a lot of reading,” Trump added. “I don’t believe we’re going to redact anything.”
The CIA and Federal Bureau of Investigation, which were involved in JFK assassination investigations and in the document release, had no immediate comment.
A mad Justice Department scramble to meet Trump’s deadline
Trump’s order reportedly set off a scramble within the Justice Department’s National Security Division to meet Trump’s deadline, according to ABC News and Reuters.
In an email just before 5 p.m. ET Monday, a senior official within DOJ’s Office of Intelligence said that even though the FBI had already conducted “an initial declassification review” of the documents, “all” of the attorneys in the operations section now had to provide “a second set of eyes” to help with this “urgent NSD-wide project.,” ABC News reported Tuesday.
More: Task force on government secrets to interview ‘witnesses’ of JFK assassination
The process of releasing the files was set in motion on Trump’s first day in office on Jan. 20, when he signed an executive order aimed at fully releasing all government documents related to the assassinations of Kennedy, his brother and presidential candidate Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, D-N.Y., and civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.
A new FBI tranche of 2,400 JFK records
Last month, the FBI said it found some 2,400 new records linked to Kennedy’s assassination as well.
The agency said it was in the process of passing the documents to the National Archives and Records Administration. It’s unclear what revelations, if any, are contained in the newly discovered files.
Kennedy’s assassination has long been the subject of conspiracies after Oswald, the Marine veteran identified as Kennedy’s assassin, was shot and killed days later.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s Health and Human Services secretary, has called for release of the files to see if any U.S. officials were involved in the assassination or potential coverup. Several U.S. investigations had found no such evidence.
While millions of government records related to the Kennedy assassination have been previously released, some information remains classified and redacted. Trump said he instructed his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, to oversee the release of the remaining files.
More: FBI finds 2,400 new documents linked to JFK assassination
A federal law passed in 1992 required the Kennedy assassination records to be fully released by Oct. 26, 2017 unless the president at the time determined their release would cause “identifiable harm” to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations of such gravity that it “outweighs the public interest in disclosure.”
Trump was president when the 2017 deadline arrived. He ordered the release of nearly 2,900 records, but kept others secret because of concerns by the CIA and FBI that their release could hurt national security.
Former President Joe Biden acted in 2021, 2022 and 2023 to give agencies more time to review the records.
The documents released in 2017 included details on the FBI and CIA investigations into Oswald and information on covert Cold War operations.
Josh Meyer is USA TODAY’s Domestic Security Correspondent. You can reach him by email at [email protected]. Follow him on X at @JoshMeyerDC and Bluesky at @joshmeyerdc.bsky.social.
Contributing: Joey Garrison
