(WASHINGTON) — The decades-long wait for the release of the government’s secret files on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy could be nearing an end, with word from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) that a plan to make the documents public has been delivered to the White House under an order from President Trump.
“In accordance with the President’s executive order, ODNI submitted its plan to the White House,” a spokesperson for the office said in a Friday afternoon statement to ABC News.
However, it remains unclear how soon thousands of assassination-related documents will actually be declassified. The executive order the president signed last month required only the delivery of a plan by Friday’s deadline “for the full and complete release of records relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.”
Researchers and authors have expressed the hope that a national security establishment that has historically insisted on secrecy and dragged its heels for years on such requests from others would be spurred to fast action by Trump. But skepticism lingers among experts that any classified materials will be swiftly unredacted by officials at the CIA, FBI and other agencies.
“They face harder choices than Trump knew when he made this breezy proclamation,” author Jefferson Morley, founder of the website jfkfacts.org, told ABC News Friday. “How serious [Trump] was is going to be tested.”
Morley and other experts are particularly interested in having unfettered access to CIA documents regarding surveillance the spy agency conducted on Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Kennedy’s killing. The CIA first opened a file on Oswald following his attempted defection to the Soviet Union in 1959. In the months prior to the assassination, the agency tracked his visit to Mexico City, where he attempted to obtain a visa to travel to Cuba.
“If the Trump order is seriously implemented, we would get those files,” Morley said.
Congress voted in 1992 to have all of the government’s assassination-related documents declassified by 2017, a deadline that has been repeatedly extended by presidents Trump and Biden due to concerns raised by the national security agencies. Ongoing classification was necessary, they argued, to protect the names of agency employees, intelligence assets, sources and methods still in use by U.S. spies, as well as “still-classified covert action programs still in effect,” per a December 2022 CIA memo to the White House.
President Trump’s Jan. 23 order said he has determined that redactions are no longer “consistent with the public interest” and that “the release of these records is long overdue.”
Trump in that same order also requested a plan for the release of classified records related to the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, with a deadline of early March.
The National Archives, which holds custody of the assassination-related records, said in a statement to ABC News Friday that it “looks forward to implementing the President’s direction in partnership with our agency partners.”
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