President Trump has long obsessed over the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and tried, during his first administration, to fully release all government documents related to his death in 1963 and subsequent investigations.
Mr. Trump released more pages on Tuesday evening, saying the files — unlike many in past years — will not be redacted, and suggesting that they will finally answer every question about the assassination. Historians are skeptical that much new will be revealed. Here’s what to know.
Why are these documents being released now?
President Trump issued an executive order in January directing national security agencies to develop plans to release all government records relating to the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.
“More than more than 50 years after these assassinations,” a White House fact sheet said, “the victims’ families and the American people deserve the truth.”
Mr. Trump directed that records relating to President Kennedy’s assassination be released first, with material relating to the King and Robert Kennedy assassinations to follow. Officials have provided no timeline of their plans to make those files public.
How many assassination documents are there?
Congress passed a law in 1992 directing the National Archives and Records Administration to gather all known U.S. government records relating to the Kennedy assassination in one place.
The agency assembled the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection, which combines federal records with material from state and local law enforcement that was acquired during the federal government’s investigation.
Today, the collection, stored at an archives facility in College Park, Md., holds more than six million pages of documents, so 80,000 pages is hardly a major trove.
Most were gathered by the Church Committee, a Senate select committee convened in 1975 to investigate the activities of American intelligence agencies, and by the House Committee on Assassinations, established in 1976 to investigate the killings of President Kennedy and Dr. King. The records of those committees remained secret after the commissions finished their work.
Did Hollywood prompt Congress to pass the 1992 law?
The law creating the Kennedy records collection was passed in the wake of Oliver Stone’s 1991 film “J.F.K.,” which cast doubt on the idea that President Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, had acted alone, as government investigations had concluded, and prompted a new wave of interest in conspiracy theories.
In its final report, issued in 1998, the Assassination Records Review Board said that while the movie was “largely fictional,” it highlighted a very real paradox: that various investigators expected Americas to believe their conclusions while keeping their records secret. (The records of the House committee, for example, had been ordered sealed until 2029.)
“The American public lost faith when it could not see the very documents whose contents led to these conclusions,” the report said.
The law directed that all records be made public within 25 years, except when release could do “identifiable harm” to national security or law enforcement.
How many of the records were still secret until now?
The vast majority of the documents — some 99 percent — have long been available. But as the 1992 law’s deadline for release approached, thousands were still withheld in full or in part.
In 2017, during his first term, Mr. Trump promised to release all remaining documents. But he ultimately agreed to some redactions at the behest of the intelligence agencies, to protect the identities of C.I.A assets, intelligence gathering methods and partnerships.
Between 2017 and 2023, there were four file releases. In 2023, President Biden declared that he had made a “final certification,” and the law’s requirements were met. Still, close to 5,000 documents remained withheld, in accordance with intelligence agency concerns or laws relating to grand jury secrecy and tax privacy.
What are historians hoping to learn from the new documents?
Few historians expect that the files will include major surprises, let alone upend the consensus that Oswald acted alone. And they caution that they most likely will include many duplicates of material that is already available elsewhere.
But the documents could still provide significant new details, including about Oswald’s activities in the months leading to the assassination, such as his visits to the Soviet and Cuban Embassies in Mexico City. The documents could also clarify the degree to which the agencies shared — or failed to share — information on his activities and connections.
This release, like earlier ones, could also include documents that have little to do with the assassinations, but shed light on various legal and illegal activities of the intelligence agencies, like their surveillance and infiltration of radical groups, or the F.B.I’s wiretapping of Dr. King.
Can ordinary people now see these records?
All declassified government records are accessible to both scholars and the general public, online or in person. In 2023, the archives began what it describes as a “concerted effort” to digitize all released Kennedy assassination records. Before this release, 700,000 documents had been digitized and posted on its website.
So is this everything? Or will more records continue to surface?
Possibly. In February, the F.B.I. announced that it had scoured its own vast archive in response to President Trump’s executive order and found roughly 2,400 additional records, which it said it was transferring to the National Archives.
Other records with relevance to the assassinations and the investigations may continue to surface elsewhere, including some that remain under grand jury seal or were donated from private collections on the condition that they remain secret until some future date determined by the donor.
