Trump promises to lift the shroud on JFK murder, releasing all classified documents

After Joe Biden refused to, Donald Trump has promised to declassify all the top secret documents related to John F Kennedy’s assassination 60 years ago.

After Joe Biden refused to, Donald Trump has promised to de-classify all the top secret documents related to John F Kennedy’s assassination. Picture: AFP

Donald Trump has promised to release all the remaining top secret documents surrounding former president John F Kennedy’s assassination, after Joe Biden for the third year in a row refused to release a remaining fraction of them.

Former president Trump, the front runner for the Republican party’s 2024 presidential nomination, said on Friday (Saturday AEST) he would “declassify and unseal all JFK assassination related documents”, despite himself having withheld their release during his presidency.

“It‘s been 60 years, time for the American people to know the TRUTH!” Mr Trump on his social media platform Truth.

JFK was assassinated in 1963.

The controversy surrounding the former president’s assassination in Dallas in November 1963 returned to the spotlight in April after Robert F Kennedy Junior, the former president’s nephew and Democrat presidential candidate, announced a White House bid, and repeatedly accused the CIA of being involved.

“The assassination was 60 years ago. What national security secrets could possibly be at risk? What are they hiding?,” Mr Kennedy, who also believes the CIA were involved in his father’s Robert F Kennedy’s assassination in 1968, said last week.

“Public trust in government is at an all-time low. Releasing these records would be a small but significant step toward regaining that trust”.

Mr Trump, who refused to release all the documents as president, told confidant and political strategist Roger Stone that the remaining documents were “so horrible you wouldn’t believe”, according to Mr Stone recollection in an interview on podcast Human Events last week.

“If, as the Warren commission insists, there was no international involvement nor foreign state actors involved in JFK’s murder, what would be the national security interest in keeping the record sealed”.

The Warren commission, appointed by the US government to investigate the murder, concluded in 1964 the US government was not involved, and the accused Lee Harvey Oswald, who was himself shot days after the assassination by nightclub owner Jack Ruby, before any trial, acted alone.

John and Jacqueline Kennedy in 1960. Picture: Getty

A subsequent congressional investigation in 1978 disputed the commission’s findings and concluded John F Kennedy was “probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy” but didn’t offer further details.

Animosity between JFK and the CIA and US military leading up to his assassination over the aborted Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and the war in Vietnam, along with a series of unusual and hard to explain facts surrounding the murder, have fanned conspiracy theories for decades.

JFK, whose daughter Caroline is currently US Ambassador to Australia, sacked CIA director Allen Dulles, a leading figure on the Warren Commission, two years before the assassination.

In 1992 the JFK Assassination Collection Records Act instructed the National Archives to release all related documents by 2017 unless the president objected.

“This action reflects his instruction that all information related to President Kennedy‘s assassination should be released, except when the strongest possible reasons council otherwise,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters last week after the decision emerged late Friday night local time before the July 4 holiday weekend.

The Biden administration has declassified around 14,000 JFK-related documents, including a further 1,103 last week, amounting to around 99 per of the total, the White House said.

Jefferson Morley, a veteran US journalist who tracks the controversy, said around 4,000 documents remain classified or redacted on his Substack JFK Facts.

Experts on the murder have long given up on any smoking gun emerging from the remaining documents but expect them to show the CIA, or other parts of the US intelligence apparatuses, had greater knowledge of Oswald than was suggested by the Warren Commission.