The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has confirmed that it would comply with the executive order signed by U.S. President Donald Trump to declassify all remaining files related to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr.
The executive order signed on Thursday at the White House, aims to provide long-awaited transparency and answers to the American public.
The order instructs the Director of National Intelligence and the Attorney General to develop a plan for releasing the JFK files within 15 days and the RFK and MLK files within 45 days.
FBI said it will work with relevant agencies to facilitate the release of these records.
In a symbolic gesture, President Trump gave the pen used to sign the order to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., son of the late Robert F. Kennedy.
According CBS News, the Order was signed after an aide announced the president was signing the executive action “ordering the declassification of files relating to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and Dr. Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.”.
“That’s a big one, huh? A lot of people are waiting for this for a long — for years, for decades,” President Trump replied.
Thereafter, the president instructed his aide to give the pen he used to sign the order to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the son of the late Robert F. Kennedy and Mr. Trump’s nominee to run the Department of Health and Human Services.
The elder Kennedy served as U.S. Attorney General, New York senator and was a Democratic presidential candidate when he was slain in 1968.
In a statement provided to CBS News Thursday evening, the FBI said it is “complying” with the executive order that “requires the review within 15 days of ‘records related to’ the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and within 45 days related to the assassinations of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.”
The FBI added the order “also requires designated agencies to submit a plan to the White House for ‘the full and complete release of these records.’”
After a release of some of the JFK files in 2022, the National Archives and Records Administration said 97% of the roughly 5 million pages in its collection related to the assassination were public.
The president promised during his first administration in 2017 that he would release the remaining JFK files. That included some 3,000 documents that had never been made public and 30,000 that had been previously released with redactions, but not all of the files were made public during his first term.
It should be instructive that the US Congress had in 1992, mandated that all assassination documents should be released within 25 years.
While Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated on 6th June 1968, PIH Health Good Samaritan Hospital, Los Angeles, California, United States, his brother John F. Kennedy was assassinated on 22nd November 1963, Parkland Health, Dallas Texas, United States.
Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on 4 April 1968, at St. Joseph’s Hospital Memphis.
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