On January 23rd, 2025 President Trump signed an executive order to release confidential files on the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy. Trump made a statement claiming that he will no longer withhold information from the public seeing that the release of the files is long overdue. Many of the documents have been redacted.

In 2023, the National Archives concluded their review of the classified documents related to the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, with 99% of the records being made publicly available. Despite the previous pledges of former attempts to release the files including President Trump’s, the CIA and the State Department still have documents that they have refused to release. 

    A CIA document was released in response to Trump when he was President in 2017 regarding the release of John F. Kennedy’s files but it was postponed. Trump instructed his aide to give the pen he used to sign the order to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., John F. Kennedy’s Grandson. Trump’s order requires the director of National Intelligence and an Attorney General neither have officially confirmed yet to spend the next 15 days coming up with a plan to release the JFK files. Then, they have 45 days to come up with plans to release all the RFK and MLK files. In a statement provided by CBS news on Thursday January 23rd, the FBI stated that they are complying with the executive order that requires the review within 15 days of records related to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and within 45 days they would work on the assassination related to Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. In 2017, Trump promised during his first administration that he would release the remaining John F. Kennedy files that included 3,000 documents that had never been released and the other 30,000 that had been released with redactions, but not all of the assassination files were made public. In 1992, Congress mandated that all of the assassination documents would be released in at least 25 years.