Previously Classified JFK Files Released

Previously classified documents related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy were released Tuesday following an order by President Trump shortly after he took office. The 1,123 files were posted on the website of the US National Archives and Records Administration. The vast majority of the National Archives' collection of over 6 million pages of records, photographs, motion pictures, sound recordings, and artifacts related to the assassination have previously been released, the AP reports.

• Trump told reporters Monday that has administration will be releasing 80,000 files, though it's not clear how many of those are among the millions of pages of records that have already been made public. "We have a tremendous amount of paper. You've got a lot of reading," Trump said while visiting the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington.

• Researchers have estimated that 3,000 records or so hadn't been released, either in whole or in part. And last month, the FBI said that it had discovered about 2,400 new records related to the assassination.
• Many who have studied what's been released so far by the government say the public shouldn't anticipate any earth-shattering revelations from the newly released documents, but there is still intense interest in details related to the assassination and the events surrounding it.
• Trump's January order directed the national intelligence director and attorney general to develop a plan to release the records. A year after the Nov. 22, 1963 assassination, the Warren Commission, which President Lyndon B. Johnson established to investigate, concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone and that there was no evidence of a conspiracy. But that didn't quell a web of alternative theories over the decades.
• In the early 1990s, the federal government mandated that all assassination-related documents be housed in a single collection in the National Archives and Records Administration. The collection was required to be opened by 2017, barring any exemptions designated by the president. Trump, who took office for his first term in 2017, had said that he would allow the release of all of the remaining records but ended up holding some back because of what he called the potential harm to national security.

(More John F. Kennedy stories.)