The United States (U.S.) government began releasing confidential documents two days ago regarding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which, even after more than 60 years, continues to fuel conspiracy theories. The document release followed an executive order by President Donald Trump in January of this year, demanding that unredacted confidential documents in this case be unsealed.
Historians do not expect many extraordinary revelations in these documents, which they began reviewing in detail after their release two days ago.
Trump estimated that about 80.000 pages of documents would be unsealed.
U.S. authorities had previously allowed the release of hundreds of thousands of documents on Kennedy, but some were withheld, citing concerns over national security.
Many U.S. citizens still believe that the man who fired the shots, Lee Harvey Oswald, did not act alone.
Kennedy was assassinated during a visit to Dallas, Texas, on November 22nd, 1963.
It is unclear how much of the confidential material on Kennedy released by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration is new.
The vast majority of the National Archives collection – comprising more than six million pages of records, photographs, films, audio recordings, and artifacts related to the assassination – was previously released in a partially redacted form.
“You have a lot to read. I don’t believe we’ll redact anything,” Trump told reporters on Monday while announcing the release of these confidential documents.
However, it appears that some of the hundreds of documents unsealed two days ago contain blacked-out passages, U.S. media report, while others are difficult to read due to fading or poor-quality scanned photocopies.
A government commission determined that Kennedy was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, a former Marine and self-proclaimed Marxist who defected to the Soviet Union and later returned to the U.S.
However, for decades, polls have indicated that most U.S. citizensdo not believe Oswald was the sole assassin.
Unanswered questions have long surrounded the case, fueling theories about the involvement of government agents and the mafia, as well as some more complex claims.
In 1992, Congress passed a law mandating the unsealing of all documents related to the investigation within 25 years.
Both Trump, during his first term, and Joseph Biden released a large number of documents related to Kennedy, but thousands have remained partially or fully classified.
Trump’s executive order from two months ago also calls on the National Archives to unseal confidential documents related to the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. Both were killed in 1968.
