WASHINGTON ― President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday released what it said were all of the government’s classified files on the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, making tens of thousands of pages of unredacted records available to the public for the first time.
The release of the files comes after Trump signed a day one executive order in January aimed at fully releasing government documents related to the assassinations of Kennedy, his brother and presidential candidate Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, D-N.Y., and civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.
The contents of the documents, and whether any previously unreleased information is in them, wasn’t immediately clear. Historians quickly said they would need time to assess the flood of files to understand if they were significantly different from previous releases.
The documents were not expected to change the long-held findings that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assassinating Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963 while riding in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas.
Read the JFK files
Looking to read the JFK files yourself? You can find them on the National Archives’ website here.
Most of the files are scans of documents, and some are blurred or have become faint or difficult to read in the decades since Kennedy’s assassination. There are also photographs and sounds recordings, mostly from the 1960s.
– Marina Pitofsky
Some JFK documents reference Oswald, KGB
Some of the documents played down Oswald’s Soviet connection in the mid-twentieth century. One dated November 1991 cited a report from an American professor named E.B. Smith who reported he had talked in Moscow about Oswald with KGB official “Slava” Nikonov, who said he had reviewed five thick files about the assassin to determine if he had been a KGB agent.
“Nikonov is now confident that Oswald was at no time an agent controlled by the KGB,” Smith reported.
– Reuters
Documents touch on Lee Harvey Oswald theories
Some of the documents also include references to various conspiracy theories suggesting that Oswald left the Soviet Union in 1962 intent on assassinating the popular young president.
Department of Defense documents from 1963 covered the Cold War of the early 1960s and the U.S. involvement in Latin America, trying to thwart Cuban leader Fidel Castro’s support of communist forces in other countries.
The documents suggest that Castro would not go so far as to provoke a war with the United States or escalate to the point “that would seriously and immediately endanger the Castro regime.”
“It appears more likely that Castro might intensify his support of subversive forces in Latin America,” the document reads.
– Reuters
What did experts initially say about the JFK files?
James Johnston, author of “Murder, Inc.: The CIA under John F. Kennedy” told USA TODAY that he wasn’t expecting any bombshells, given that virtually all of the relevant agencies – including the CIA – had promised to turn over everything they had years ago to the National Archives in 1988.
“If it was going to embarrass the agency or tell a different story, they wouldn’t have turned them over to the National Archives in the first place,” said Johnston, who was a staff member of the congressional Church Committee that investigated the CIA in 1975. “And if they were withholding them before, I’m guessing they would continue to withhold them.”
Johnston cited one particular document that he knows exists but that he says hasn’t been turned over to the National Archives – the first one-on-one conversation between President Lyndon Johnson and CIA Director John McCone right after Johnson took office after Kennedy’s assassination.
McCone was long suspected of withholding information from the Warren Commission, the panel Johnson created to investigate Kennedy’s murder, according to Philip Shenon, author of “A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination.”
McCone was kept on as CIA director by Johnson and pledged full cooperation with the commission, which was led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, Shenon wrote in a 2015 Politico article about his book’s findings. He testified that the CIA had no evidence to suggest that Oswald was part of any conspiracy, foreign or domestic, but rather a former Marine and self-proclaimed Marxist who acted as a delusional lone wolf.
That depiction of Oswald was ultimately adopted by the Warren Commission in its final report. But years later, Shenon said, the CIA itself acknowledged that McCone had withheld information from commission investigators.
What is the Warren Commission?
Several of the documents released Tuesday are tied to the Warren Commission: But what is it?
After Kennedy was shot in 1963, his successor Lyndon B. Johnson created a commission to investigate the assassination. The Warren Commission determined that Oswald, who was arrested and later shot by a nightclub owner on live television, acted alone.
Still, the assassination has fueled intense debate and a myriad of theories challenging the conclusion of the Warren Commission. Polls have shown that many Americans believe Kennedy’s death was part of a wider conspiracy.
– Christopher Cann
Part of Trump’s promise of ‘maximum transparency’ at the nation’s intelligence agencies
Trump himself did not immediately post about the document release. But Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of National Intelligence, hailed their release, saying it was part of Trump’s promise for “maximum transparency and a commitment to rebuild the trust of the American people in the Intelligence Community (IC) and federal agencies.”
Critics have long accused the intelligence community, and CIA in particular, of withholding potentially revelatory information about the case. Still, intelligence officials over the years have insisted that they have released everything important and that what’s left was withheld only to protect highly classified sources and methods of gathering intelligence and protecting sources.
In a statement, Gabbard said that she immediately sent out a directive across the intelligence community after Trump’s Monday announcement ordering everyone to provide all unredacted records within the collection of documents about Kennedy’s assassination the national archives for immediate release.
JFK file experts said those documents almost certainly have all been made public and viewed already, but with mostly minor redactions.
Not all documents posted online Tuesday night
The documents were released just before 7 p.m.
The National Archives and Records Administration, the keeper of the documents, posted them with this statement:
“In accordance with President Donald Trump’s directive of March 17, 2025, all records previously withheld for classification that are part of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection are released.”
The National Archives said it partnered with agencies across the federal government to comply with the President’s directive in support of Executive Order 14176. It said the records are available to access either online or in person, via hard copy or on analog media formats, at the National Archives at College Park, Maryland.
“As the records continue to be digitized, they will be posted to this page,” the National Archives said, suggesting that not all of the documents were being released on Tuesday in digital form.
The National Archives also said some information might still be withheld under court seal or for grand jury secrecy, and because some tax return information is subject to Internal Revenue Code prohibitions.
More: Trump’s release of assassination docs opens window into nation’s most debated mysteries
‘People have been waiting for decades for this’
The digital document dump came one day after Trump announced the files would be released during a visit to the John F. Kennedy Center of the Performing Arts, which he’s taken over as board chairman.
“People have been waiting for decades for this,” Trump told reporters.
“We have a tremendous amount of paper. You’ve got a lot of reading,” Trump added. “I don’t believe we’re going to redact anything.”
The CIA and Federal Bureau of Investigation, which were involved in JFK assassination investigations and in the document release, had no immediate comment.
A mad Justice Department scramble to meet Trump’s deadline
Trump’s order reportedly set off a scramble within the Justice Department’s National Security Division to meet Trump’s deadline, according to ABC News and Reuters.
In an email just before 5 p.m. ET Monday, a senior official within DOJ’s Office of Intelligence said that even though the FBI had already conducted “an initial declassification review” of the documents, “all” of the attorneys in the operations section now had to provide “a second set of eyes” to help with this “urgent NSD-wide project.,” ABC News reported Tuesday.
More: Task force on government secrets to interview ‘witnesses’ of JFK assassination
The process of releasing the files was set in motion on Trump’s first day in office on Jan. 20, when he signed an executive order aimed at fully releasing all government documents related to the assassinations of Kennedy, his brother and presidential candidate Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, D-N.Y., and civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.
A new FBI tranche of 2,400 JFK records
Last month, the FBI said it found some 2,400 new records linked to Kennedy’s assassination as well.
The agency said it was in the process of passing the documents to the National Archives and Records Administration. It’s unclear what revelations, if any, are contained in the newly discovered files.
Kennedy’s assassination has long been the subject of conspiracies after Oswald, the Marine veteran identified as Kennedy’s assassin, was shot and killed days later.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s Health and Human Services secretary, has called for release of the files to see if any U.S. officials were involved in the assassination or potential coverup. Several U.S. investigations had found no such evidence.
While millions of government records related to the Kennedy assassination have been previously released, some information remains classified and redacted. Trump said he instructed his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, to oversee the release of the remaining files.
More: FBI finds 2,400 new documents linked to JFK assassination
A federal law passed in 1992 required the Kennedy assassination records to be fully released by Oct. 26, 2017 unless the president at the time determined their release would cause “identifiable harm” to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations of such gravity that it “outweighs the public interest in disclosure.”
Trump was president when the 2017 deadline arrived. He ordered the release of nearly 2,900 records, but kept others secret because of concerns by the CIA and FBI that their release could hurt national security.
Former President Joe Biden acted in 2021, 2022 and 2023 to give agencies more time to review the records.
The documents released in 2017 included details on the FBI and CIA investigations into Oswald and information on covert Cold War operations.
Josh Meyer is USA TODAY’s Domestic Security Correspondent. You can reach him by email at [email protected]. Follow him on X at @JoshMeyerDC and Bluesky at @joshmeyerdc.bsky.social.
Contributing: Ed Brackett, Joey Garrison
