Trump releases JFK assassination files

WASHINGTON — US President Donald Trump released material related to the 1963 assassination of former president John F. Kennedy on Tuesday, seeking to honor his campaign promise to provide more transparency about the shock event in Texas.

An initial tranche of electronic copies of papers flooded into the National Archives website in the evening with a total of more than 80,000 expected to be published after the Justice Department lawyers spent hours scouring them.

The release is nonetheless likely to intrigue people who have long been fascinated with a dramatic period in history, with the assassination and with Kennedy himself.

Larry J. Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics and author of The Kennedy Half Century, said it will take time to fully review the records.

"We have a lot of work to do for a long time to come, and people just have to accept that," he said.

Many of the files reflected the work by investigators to learn more about assassin Lee Harvey Oswald's time in then Soviet Union and track his movements in the months leading up to Kennedy's assassination in Dallas on Nov 22, 1963.

An initial review of the papers did not show deviations from the central narrative.

Some of the documents from previous releases have offered details on the way intelligence services operated at the time, including CIA cables and memos discussing visits by Oswald to the Soviet Union and Cuban embassies during a trip to Mexico City just weeks before the assassination.

Trump's secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the son of Robert Kennedy and nephew of John F. Kennedy, has said he believes the Central Intelligence Agency was involved in his uncle's death, an allegation the agency has described as baseless.

Fredrik Logevall, a Harvard history professor whose books include JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century 1917-56, said in an email the new documents may help fill in the picture.

"It's valuable to get all the documentation out, ideally in unredacted form. But I don't expect dramatic new revelations that alter in some fundamental way our grasp of the event," he said.

Trump signed an order shortly after taking office in January related to the release of documents, prompting the Federal Bureau of Investigation to find thousands of new documents.

In the scramble to comply with Trump's order, the US Justice Department ordered some of its lawyers who handle sensitive national security matters to urgently review records from the assassination, according to a Monday evening email seen by Reuters.

"President Trump is ushering in a new era of maximum transparency," Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said in a post on X.

Alice L. George, a historian whose books, including The Assassination of John F. Kennedy, explore the modern US, said US people's curiosity about assassinations and questions about government transparency add "to a sense that there must be important evidence hidden away in these files".

But she said government records were unlikely to resolve questions people still have. "I think there may continue to be more record releases," she said.

Agencies via Xinhua