Donald Trump has promised to make things real interesting, real fast for America’s hordes of conspiracy theorists—not to mention Hollywood screenwriters and the creators of lucrative true-crime podcasts.
“In the coming days, we are going to make public remaining records related to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert Kennedy, as well as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other topics of great public interest,” the incoming president said at a rally in downtown Washington on Sunday, Reuters reported.
The move would fulfill a campaign promise to release classified intelligence and law enforcement files on President Kennedy’s 1963 assassination. The Gallup polling company found in 2023 that more than half of Americans doubted the Justice Department’s official finding that gunman Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone.
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Those include Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s nominee to head the federal Department of Health and Human Services, who believes his uncle was killed in a plot involving the CIA. He also thinks his father, assassinated in 1968 by a Palestinian-Jordanian man named Sirhan Sirhan over his support for Israel, was in fact killed by multiple gunmen.
The CIA has described those claims as baseless, according to Reuters.
During his first term in office, Trump made similar promises to release the investigation reports into those high-profile assassinations. He released some documents related to President Kennedy’s death, but for national security reasons he was ultimately convinced by the CIA and FBI to keep most of the documents classified.
This time around, though, Trump has vowed to be less deferential to both agencies. Already his team has been working to surround the president with MAGA loyalists, even for nonpolitical positions related to national security.
Not only would declassifying the documents appease Kennedy Jr.; regardless of what they reveal, their contents would be bound to dominate news headlines and social media chatter.
Which could leave Trump escaping scrutiny as he rakes in the crypto money from his new meme coin—not to mention all his other potential conflicts of interest in his second White House term.
