The FBI said on Monday that it has discovered nearly 2,400 records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. These records were found during a search prompted by an executive order from President Trump to release files related to the 1963 assassination.
The bureau stated that the newly discovered documents, which have been digitized and archived, were “previously unknown to be associated with the JFK assassination case files.” The FBI also mentioned that it has properly cataloged these records and is working on transferring them to the National Archives and Records Administration as part of an ongoing declassification process. However, the bureau did not specify the contents of these records.
Mr. Trump signed an executive order during his first week in office calling for the declassification of files related to the assassinations of Kennedy, his brother Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.
The order gave the Director of National Intelligence and the Attorney General 15 days to present a plan to the president for the “full and complete disclosure of all records” related to the Kennedy assassination.
In 1992, Congress enacted the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, which mandated that all assassination-related materials be stored in a collection within the National Archives and be made publicly available. The law granted federal agencies 25 years to process and release the documents, with certain exceptions. The collection at the National Archives consists of more than five million pages of records.
For the past three decades, the National Archives has been making Kennedy assassination-related materials available to the public, with the most recent batch released in August 2023. In December 2022, the agency stated that more than 97% of its Kennedy collection was accessible to the American public.