John F Kennedy was shot dead in Dallas, Texas, in 1963 (Pictures: Getty/Bettman Archive)
More than 31,000 pages related to the assassination of former president John F Kennedy were released after an order from President Donald Trump.
He promised on the campaign trail last year that he would order the declassification of all remaining documents on the assassination – and last night, the US National Archives and Records Administration posted them.
Many of the files released had already been public, but versions of about a third of the redacted documents held by the National Archives have now been released in full.
Larry J Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Centre for Politics said he had a team that started going through the documents but it may be some time before their full significance becomes clear.
‘We have a lot of work to do for a long time to come, and people just have to accept that,’ he said.
Speaking to reporters about the release, Trump said: ‘We have a tremendous amount of paper. You’ve got a lot of reading.’
Here’s what you need to know about the files.
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What happened to JFK?
Interest in details related to Kennedy’s assassination has been intense over the decades, with countless conspiracy theories spawned.
He was killed on November 22, 1963, on a visit to Dallas, when his motorcade was finishing its parade route downtown and shots rang out from the Texas School Book Depository building.
Police arrested 24-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald, who had positioned himself from a sniper’s perch on the sixth floor. Two days later nightclub owner Jack Ruby fatally shot Oswald during a jail transfer.
A year after the assassination, the Warren Commission, which President Lyndon B Johnson established to investigate, concluded that Oswald acted alone and there was no evidence of a conspiracy. But that did not quell a web of alternative theories over the decades.
Oswald was a former Marine who defected to the Soviet Union before returning home to Texas.
When did Trump release the JFK files?
Trump first said he would release 80,000 pages of unredacted files from the JFK case when he took office in January.
While touring the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC on March 17, he announced they would be released on March 18.
What is in the JFK files?
JFK documents - from Doc ending in 35 - released by the national archive
One document was a letter to the British Embassy from a Mr Sergyj Czornonoh (Picture: National Archive)
The Dallas Police Department mug shots of Lee Harvey Oswald following his arrest for possible involvement in the John F Kennedy assassination and the murder of Officer JD Tippit. (Photo by ?? CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)
Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested for Kennedy’s death (Picture: Getty)
Metro viewed some of the documents and found many went into espionage assignments (likely released due to rumours about Lee Harvey Oswald being a member of the KGB), but many of the documents are mundane.
Hundreds of the documents were actually already released by former President Joe Biden in 2022 when the National Archives made 13,000 new files available.
The ‘new’ files, released by Trump, are many of the same released by Biden, but with redactions removed.
Files in the new release included a memo from the CIA’s St Petersburg station from November 1991 saying that earlier that month, a CIA official befriended a US professor there who told the official about a friend who worked for the KGB.
The memo said the KGB official had reviewed ‘five thick volumes’ of files on Oswald and was ‘confident that Oswald was at no time an agent controlled by the KGB’.
It added that as Oswald was described in the files, the KGB official doubted ‘that anyone could control Oswald, but noted that the KGB watched him closely and constantly while he was in the USSR’.
It also noted that the file reflected that Oswald was a poor shot when he tried target firing in the Soviet Union.
When will the JFK files be released to the public?
FILE - This Nov. 22, 1963 file photo shows President John F. Kennedy riding in motorcade with first lady Jacqueline Kenndy in Dallas, Texas. (AP Photo, file)
The files are available to publicly view (Picture: AP)
The files are already released to the public – and thousands have been publicly available for years already.
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.
Around 500 documents, including tax returns, were not subject to the 2017 disclosure requirement.
Mr 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.
And while files continued to be released during former president Biden’s administration, some remained unseen.
Biden’s press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said in July 2023 that 99 per cent of records associated with Kennedy’s assassination were available for public consumption via NARA.
Biden declassified more than 16,000 documents related to the assassination between 2021 and July 2023.
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
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