President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday, releasing additional government files associated with the assassinations of former President John F. Kennedy (JFK), former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy (RFK), and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Trump promised at his pre-inauguration rally in Washington on Jan. 19 that he would release the remaining records on the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and King in the coming days.
The FBI accused Lee Harvey Oswald, a former U.S. Marine who had defected to the Soviet Union for a period after embracing Marxism, of assassinating JFK in 1963. Nightclub owner Jack Ruby shot and killed Oswald as authorities were moving him from Dallas police headquarters to the county jail just two days after the assassination, stirring decades of speculation and conspiracy theories.
However, Biden had agreed to delay the disclosure of additional records, stating the necessity of protecting “against identifiable harms to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, and the conduct of foreign relations that are of such gravity that they outweigh the public interest in disclosure.”