President Donald Trump announced another 80,000 pages of material would be made public on Monday (17 March), but according to readers, it’s been a bit of an anticlimax.
The 78-year-old leader promised that the information would be ‘very interesting’, while claiming that no details in the docs would be redacted.
During his appearance at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC, Trump said: “We have a tremendous amount of paper. You got a lot of reading. I don’t believe we’re going to redact anything.
“They’ve been waiting for that for decades. And I said during the campaign I’d release them, and I’m a man of my word…so tomorrow you have the JFK files.”
Tomorrow has been and gone, and true to his word, the declassified documents were published by the National Archives last night (18 March).
Trump vowed to make information pertaining to three of the most high-profile assassinations on US soil – President John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King – public back in January.
People hoped the documents would reveal some new information about JFK’s murder (Bettmann/Getty Images)
He said it was an important step towards ‘restoring transparency and accountability to government’, telling Americans that ‘everything will be revealed’.
The murder of JFK has long been the subject of conspiracy theories, as not everyone is completely convinced by the official version of events.
The 35th President of the US was shot in the head by Lee Harvey Oswald on 22 November, 1963, as he drove through Dallas, Texas, in an open-topped car.
Oswald was then shot dead two days later by nightclub owner Jack Ruby – and people were hoping to find out some new information from the docs about the historic event.
But those who have had a flick through the 80,000 pages in the latest batch of JFK files reckon they were a bit of a letdown, difficult to read, and faded.
Despite Trump pretty much guaranteeing that the archives would be a real page-turner, people have all been sharing the same complaint online.
Taking to social media, one person said: “I’m quickly going through the JFK files to see if we would get everything unredacted like promised. We have not.”
Another added: “Most of these documents were marked ‘safe’ for declassification YEARS ago. There is nothing here. Where are the ‘exempt’ and ‘excluded’ JFK files?”
Despite Trump’s big promises, readers have been left disappointed (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
A third wrote: “Today, the final 80,000 JFK assassination documents were supposed to be declassified. Instead, we got a pathetic trickle – just over 1,000 files, most of them already known, heavily redacted, or long marked for release.
“A smokescreen of transparency, carefully curated to reveal nothing of substance.”
While a fourth commented: “I was told repeatedly these were going to be unredacted…”
Others were a bit more complimentary, including the likes of Republican congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna, who led the task force to declassify the JFK files.
She shared a post on X explaining she was excited to read a ‘CIA IG report from whistleblowers alleging that the CIA hid information from Congress’ about the assassination.
Luna claimed that the information was concealed because ‘it implicated them’, adding: “We were given this as a tip and there is actually a document we are currently tracking down.”
Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, also praised the President for declassifying the files in a social media post.
She wrote: “President Trump is ushering in a new era of maximum transparency. Today, per his direction, previously redacted JFK Assassination Files are being released to the public with no redactions.
“Promises made, promises kept.”
People were quick to flood her replies with examples of the multiple redactions which are in the JFK files.
The documents include hand-written notes, typewritten reports, and photocopies – but historians don’t expect a host of new revelations to emerge.
But 80,000 pages is a lot to comb through, so the jury is still out on whether the document dump was worth it at the moment.
