WASHINGTON
— President Trump has decided to release a final batch of thousands of
classified government documents related to the 1963 assassination of
President John F. Kennedy, Mr. Trump announced in a tweet on Saturday
morning.
“Subject
to the receipt of further information, I will be allowing, as
President, the long blocked and classified JFK FILES to be opened,” Mr.
Trump said on Twitter.
The
release of the information being held in secret at the National
Archives — including several thousand never-before-seen documents — was
mandated to occur by Oct. 26 under a 1992 law that sought to quell
conspiracy theories about the assassination.
Mr.
Trump has the power to block the release of the documents, and
intelligence agencies have pressured him to do so for at least some of
them. The agencies are concerned that information contained in some of
the documents could damage national security interests.
In a statement to reporters, the White House left open the possibility that Mr. Trump might halt the release of some documents.
“The
president believes that these documents should be made available in the
interests of full transparency unless agencies provide a compelling and
clear national security or law enforcement justification otherwise,”
the statement said.
It
is not known what revelations might be contained in the unreleased
documents, though researchers and authors of books about Kennedy say
they do not expect any bombshells that significantly alter the official
narrative of the assassination — that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in
Dallas — delivered in 1964 by the Warren Commission.
But
the documents are likely to “help fuel a new generation of conspiracy
theories,” according to Philip Shenon, a former New York Times reporter
and the author of a book about the commission, and Larry J. Sabato, a
University of Virginia professor and author of a book about Kennedy, who
wrote a recent article about the documents in Politico.
They
wrote that the documents relate to what they call a “mysterious chapter
in the history of the assassination — a six-day trip that J.F.K.
assassin Lee Harvey Oswald paid to Mexico City several weeks before the
president’s murder, in which Oswald met with Cuban and Soviet spies and
came under intensive surveillance by the C.I.A.’s Mexico City station.
Previously released F.B.I. documents suggest that Oswald spoke openly in
Mexico about his intention to kill Kennedy.”
With
the Oct. 26 deadline to release the remaining documents fast
approaching, Mr. Trump had been under increasing pressure from advocates
of transparency not to hold back any of the documents from the public
on the grounds of national security.
Senator
Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, introduced a resolution in the
Senate this month that urged Mr. Trump to make a “full public release
of all remaining records,” saying that he should “reject any claims for
the continued postponement of the full public release of those records.”
Conspiracy
theorists have long clamored for what they hope will be evidence to
prove that the government covered up the truth about the assassination.
This week, Roger J. Stone, a friend of Mr. Trump’s, told Alex Jones, the
radio host and conspiracy theorist, that Mr. Stone had directly urged
the president to release all the documents.
“I
had the opportunity to make the case directly to the president of the
United States by phone as to why I believe it is essential that he
release the balance of the currently redacted and classified J.F.K.
assassination documents,” Mr. Stone said on Mr. Jones’s radio program.
Mr.
Trump is no stranger to conspiracy theories, including those involving
the Kennedy assassination. During the presidential campaign, he at one point alleged
that the father of Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican primary rival from
Texas, had been with Oswald shortly before Kennedy was killed.
“You know, his father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald’s being — you know, shot,” Mr. Trump told Fox News
in an interview in May 2016, as he battled the Texas senator for the
nomination. “I mean, the whole thing is ridiculous. What is this, right,
prior to his being shot, and nobody brings it up. They don’t even talk
about that. That was reported and nobody talks about it. But I think
it’s horrible.”
He went on, “What was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the death, before the shooting? It’s horrible.”
Mr.
Trump has at times dabbled in other conspiracy theories: He once seemed
to consider the possibility that Justice Antonin Scalia had been
murdered. The president has more than once spread the discredited urban
legend about Muslims being shot with bullets dipped in pig’s blood. And
for years, he was the most vocal purveyor of the falsehood that President Barack Obama was born outside the United States.
