Former President Donald Trump believes the truth is still out there about who killed President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. And he wants the world to know.
Posting on Truth Social on Friday, Trump pledged to declassify all available documents surrounding the assassination after a December dump by the National Archives—and months of subsequent delays to release the remaining documents surrounding the case—left many amateur sleuths and conspiracy theorists wanting.
"When I return to the White House, I will declassify and unseal all JFK assassination-related documents," Trump wrote. "It's been 60 years, time for the American people to know the TRUTH!"
Some 99 percent of the documents related to the Kennedy assassination have been released, the National Archives said, while President Joe Biden declassified more than 16,000 related documents since 2021, including 1,103 last week.
To date, the released documents haven't supported a communist-led conspiracy or other theories suggesting the presence of multiple assassins.
However, the remaining 1 percent—and the decades of delays preventing their release—have raised more questions than the recent releases have answered, including how much the Central Intelligence Agency knew about alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald's activities in communist-controlled Cuba at the time.
That includes some members of the Kennedy family.
In an interview with The Messenger this week, Kennedy's nephew—Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose father, Robert F. Kennedy, was assassinated while running for president in 1968—criticized the Biden administration's delay in releasing the final 1 percent, claiming the administration was "pouring the concrete on 60-year-old secrets so that they're permanently interred."
"It's very disturbing," he said.
Trump appears to be culpable in shielding secrets about the Kennedy assassination, as well. In a July 3 interview on Real America's Voice, Roger Stone—a close confidante of Trump and a former aide to JFK's 1960 presidential opponent, Richard Nixon—claimed Trump examined some of the documents after he began the declassification process in 2017.
"He said, 'I can't tell you, it's so horrible you wouldn't believe it. Someday you'll find out.' That was the sum total of it and he didn't want to talk further about it," Stone said. "He kicked the can down the road to President Joe Biden."
Kennedy Jr.'s campaign, like Trump's, is looking to make the document release a campaign issue.
"We will never know for sure until these documents are made public in full," a spokesperson for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told Newsweek this week. "After 60 years, there are no national security concerns. The American people deserve to know their own history."
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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Nick Reynolds is a senior politics reporter at Newsweek. A native of Central New York, he previously worked as a ... Read more
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