Confirmed: JFK, RFK, MLK Assassination Docs Being Released, Mass Declassification of Gov't Docs
Want evidence that this time around is going to be different for President-elect Donald Trump? Look no further than what he promises to do with the classified files to deal with the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr.
Trump, who returns to the White House on Monday, told a crowd at the 20,000-seat Capital One Arena in Washington, D.C., on Sunday that he was going to declassify the documents.
“As the first step toward restoring transparency and accountability to government, we will also reverse the over-classification of government documents,” he told the crowd during the speech.
“And in the coming days, we are going to make public remaining records relating to the assassinations of President John F. Kenedy, his brother Robert Kennedy, as well as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”
The line, the New York Post reported, ended up ” drawing one of the loudest applauses of the night.”
It got plenty of applause outside the arena, too — including from podcaster Joe Rogan, who clipped it and posted it along with an American flag emoji:
@realDonaldTrump 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/K2qIDAEWrT
— Joe Rogan Podcast (@joeroganhq) January 19, 2025
Which, of course, led to two reactions:
That feels so ooooooo good. Hell yeah brother
— FrancescoPallitta 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 (@CescoPallitta) January 20, 2025
Damn it Joe… Trump is gonna knocked off before day 1 in office.
— Coach Ortiz (@BeSomeone09) January 20, 2025
Indeed, this is pretty much what everyone thought when Trump passed on this the first time he was in office.
In 2017, a deadline set under the 1992 Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act hit which required the government to release all files of the JFK assassination. Trump decided against it, based in no small part on then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo, later the secretary of state.
Instead, he pushed the release of all the documents off to October 2021. President Joe Biden again punted on that deadline.
Trump’s reason for punting, however, was that “an undisclosed amount of material will remain under wraps because the potential harm to U.S. national security or foreign affairs is ‘of such gravity the it outweighs the public interest in immediate disclosure.'”
It’s interesting that this came 55 years after JFK’s assassination and a solid 27 years after Oliver Stone’s fever-dream film “JFK.” If anything in those files could possibly more kooky and risible than what was posited that film — which strongly suggested, in its inchoate manner, that an ad hoc alliance between closeted gays, the mafia, and what we’d come to call the deep state had been responsible for killing Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963 — then those documents should have been declassified decades ago.
If you can’t tell by my tone, I strongly suspect there isn’t anything dispositive there — but either way, America deserves to see it. The same thing goes for the 1968 shootings of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, then seeking the Democratic nomination for president.
That being said, it’s worth noting that the documents could shed light on shady activity by the CIA. As Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said during an August interview with Tucker Carlson, “More than 60 years after my uncle’s death … none of the people who were implicated in that crime are alive now. And the last ones have died off in the last year or two. And so, it clearly is to protect the [CIA]. And that’s wrong.
“It’s just wrong,” Kennedy added. “It’s wrong for Democrats, and it’s wrong for Republicans … I was astonished that Trump didn’t declassify them because he promised to during the [2016] campaign.”
Again, this is another sign that the second Trump term is going to be significantly different than the first: He’s reminding America of this just before he takes the oath of office, quite a bit wiser about how Washington works. Pompeo, it’s worth noting, doesn’t have a role in this administration. Neither does the parade of officials who would either later go on to brag about how they bent Trump’s ear to the mainstream media, or angle to bend Trump’s ear again by not burning bridges and seeing if they could get themselves in a plum role if he were to get elected a second time.
He’s going there, apparently — and America has every right to know, especially given the fact JFK’s assassination was over 60 years ago.
Do I expect to find definitive proof that Oliver Stone’s “JFK” was accurate and that Tommy Lee Jones and Joe Pesci, inter alia, were involved in a cabal that knocked off Kennedy, and they would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for that meddling Kevin Costner? Negative. But it’ll be a sign that eight years of Trumpism — both in the White House and on the campaign trail after that — has changed the GOP, for the moment, at least, from a component in good standing of the establishment Beltway uniparty into an outsider force to be reckoned with.
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