More than 60 years after President John F. Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas, the federal government on Tuesday began releasing what could be the final trove of documents delving into the assassination that shocked the nation and spawned countless conspiracy theories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The National Archives and Records Administration started posting the long-awaited files just before 7 p.m. \u2014 a day after President Donald Trump announced that 80,000 pages related to the fatal shooting on Nov. 22, 1963, were about to be released.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIn accordance with President Donald Trump<\/a>\u2019s 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 administration’s statement read.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Within minutes, thousands of documents that had been hidden from the public for decades appeared on the site<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It wasn\u2019t immediately clear whether the trove of documents contains any bombshells or evidence to counter the conclusion the Warren Commission reached in 1964 that a lone gunman named Lee Harvey Oswald fired the fatal shots<\/a> from the Texas Schoolbook Depository.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cYou got a lot of reading,\u201d Trump said Monday as he visited the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. \u201cI don\u2019t believe we\u2019re going to redact anything.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Trump was cagey about what would be in those files. Historians contend that around 4,700 documents<\/a> haven’t yet been released.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “The origins of the 80,000 pages of material are unknown,” Jefferson Morley, an expert on the JFK assassination and the CIA, wrote on his \u201cJFK Facts<\/a>\u201d blog before the new batch of documents was released.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Justice Department lawyers worked all night to review hundreds of pages of classified documents before they were released, a person familiar with the matter told NBC News.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It also remained to be seen whether the document drop would finally put to rest the widespread public skepticism of the government’s official explanation that Oswald acted alone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cPeople have so many doubts,\u201d presidential historian Michael Beschloss said. \u201cThere are so many theories that are conflicting. It\u2019s very hard for me to imagine that there will be one piece of evidence that will make everyone agree on what happened here. What most people do agree is that the killing of John Kennedy changed history, and mainly in a bad way.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n When Trump was campaigning last year and trying to win the endorsement of JFK’s nephew Robert F. Kennedy Jr., he renewed his promise to release the files.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hours after he snagged RFK Jr.’s endorsement in August, Trump\u2002<\/a>vowed<\/a> that if elected, he would establish a commission on assassination attempts in honor of RFK Jr., who is now his secretary of health and human services.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Shortly after he began his second term, Trump signed an executive order mandating the release of all records related to President Kennedy’s assassination, as well as the 1968 assassinations of RFK Jr.\u2019s father, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy Sr., and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Under the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992<\/a>, all the documents related to the assassination were supposed to have been released by 2017, when Trump was president the first time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Trump released some JFK-related documents then, but he also gave the intelligence agencies more time to assess the remaining files.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It wasn’t until December 2022 that President Joe Biden released more than 13,000<\/a>\u2002<\/strong><\/a>records<\/a> after the Mary Ferrell Foundation<\/a>, the country\u2019s largest nonprofit repository of JFK assassination records, sued<\/a>\u2002the administration<\/a> to make all the documents public.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But Biden released only about 98% of all the documents related to the killing that remained in the National Archives<\/a>, which controls<\/a> the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt\u2019s high time that the government got its act together and obeyed the spirit and the letter of the law,\u201d Morley, who is also the vice president of the nonpartisan Mary Ferrell Foundation, said at the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThis is about our history and our right to know it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The 4,700 or so records that were kept under wraps\u2002<\/a>were believed to have included more information about accused Oswald’s sojourn in Mexico City before the assassination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Among those documents were 44 related to CIA agent George Joannides and a covert Cuba-related program he ran that came into contact with Oswald less than four months before Kennedy was shot, according to calculations made by JFK researchers with the Mary Ferrell Foundation<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n