As promised by President Donald Trump and over objections from some law enforcement officials, authorities on Thursday released some of the documents related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy while blocking hundreds of others.
>> The records are available online through the National Archives website.
White House officials said the FBI and CIA made the most requests within the government to withhold some information.
“I have no choice,” Trump said in a memo, according to White House officials. He was placing those files under a six-month review while letting 2,800 other records come out Thursday evening, racing a deadline to honor a law mandating their release.
Officials say Trump will impress upon federal agencies that JFK files should stay secret after the six-month review “only in the rarest cases.”
The collection includes more than 3,100 documents — comprising hundreds of thousands of pages — that have never been seen by the public. About 30,000 documents were released previously — with redactions. The National Archives is to release 2,800 of the remaining records now.
Trump indicated in a tweet posted Wednesday that he wouldn’t fight the release of the documents, which takes places on the 25-year deadline mandated by Congress by the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992.
“The long anticipated release of the #JFKFiles will take place tomorrow. So interesting!” Trump tweeted.
A 1992 law required all government records related to the assassination to be "publicly disclosed in full" within 25 years. The deadline was Thursday.
The Associated Press contributed to this report
Credit: Keystone
Credit: Keystone
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