The Trump administration on Monday made public a vast trove of documents from the investigation into the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in keeping with President Trump’s executive order demanding their release.

The release of the documents, about a quarter-million pages of records posted on the National Archives website, includes notes on the leads pursued by investigators, interviews with people who interacted with the assassin James Earl Ray, and previously unreleased details of interactions with foreign intelligence services during the manhunt for Mr. Ray, said Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, who oversaw review of the documents.

It is not clear if the digitized files contain unflattering details about Dr. King’s personal life. Still, the release comes as Mr. Trump and his staff have sought to divert attention from the backlash on the right after his administration reversed course and did not release more files from the investigation into the death of the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

The King family has expressed concerns that releasing the records into Dr. King would focus attention on his well-documented sexual indiscretions. They also raised worries about whether doing so would feed a revisionist — negative — view of a man who has come to embody the fight against systemic racism and the call for a robust federal defense of minority groups that Mr. Trump has largely moved to reverse since taking office.

Trump administration officials have been in contact with Dr. King’s family, although it remains unclear if they were given the right to request redactions of material.

Dr. King’s two living children, Bernice and Martin III, asked researchers and the general public to view all of the material in the context of his contributions to American society.