Former President Donald Trump committed to releasing the outstanding archival records related to John F. Kennedy’s assassination should he win a second term.
"I released a lot, as you know. And I will release everything else," he told the Messenger.
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During his first term, Trump ordered thousands of JFK files released but kept thousands of others on hold amid concerns from the FBI and the CIA. The document dump was prompted by the 1992 Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, which set 2017 as a deadline to release all classified material about Kennedy's assassination.
In 2018, Trump delayed the full release of the tranche of Kennedy documents until October 2021 amid national security concerns. President Joe Biden later postponed that until December 2022, citing the COVID-19 pandemic.
Libertarian commentator Judge Andrew Napolitano indicated in a podcast that Trump noted concerns that the public shouldn't gain access to some of the classified content. Trump sidestepped a question about whether that was the case.
So far, Biden has released multiple batches of JFK documents. This includes nearly 1,500 in 2021 and over 13,000 last December, comprising over 70% of records previously withheld from the public.
Nevertheless, critics contend there are many documents that remain. The Mary Ferrell Foundation, a nonprofit group, slapped Biden and the National Archives and Records Administration with a lawsuit last year, contending the delay from 2017 violated the Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act.
On Nov. 22, 1963, Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas. An inquiry concluded that assassin Lee Harvey Oswald acted on his own, but questions have loomed over that fateful day over the following six decades.
Roughly "95% of the CIA documents within the JFK Assassination Records Collection" have been released to the public so far, according to a CNN report.
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Former CIA Director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo defended the Trump administration's decision not to release everything.
"Not everything was 60 years ago. And I don't want to spend a lot of time walking through this," Pompeo said in an interview earlier this year. "It's a little bit wonky, but suffice it to say, if Congress holds a hearing tomorrow on the Kennedy assassinations, the documents generated tomorrow will be part of those files."