President Donald Trump has ordered all documents related to the assassination of former President John Kennedy to be released after consulting with US intelligence agencies.
The majority of the files were released on Thursday, with the National Archives and Records Administration making 2,800 of the 3,100 documents publicly available for the first time.
Trump said that he consulted with chief of staff John Kelly and the security establishment, including the CIA and FBI, before announcing the decision on Twitter on Friday.
He said the names of addresses of people still alive will be redacted.
Trump had order the release of all the documents after publicizing 2,800 of the 3,100 new files just 24-hours earlier
The President said that releasing the documents will put ‘any and all conspiracy theories to rest,’ according to CBS News.
The National Archive said that they will hold onto redacted records for an additional 180 days in order to conduct a thorough review.
Trump said that he consulted with chief of staff John Kelly (*pictured) and the security establishment before making his decision
The CIA and FBI recommended keeping the files temporarily under wraps, saying that they were concerned the documents could potentially reveal names and activities from the near past that may still have an impact on current operations.
Some of the new information gathered in the 2,800 documents released on Thursday evening showed that the FBI was aware of Jack Ruby, the man who killed JFK’s assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.
The files also showed that former FBI head J. Edgar Hoover frustrated over Oswald’s murder, and the Soviet Union’s ‘shock’ over the murdered president, according to ABC News.
The Soviets told Hoover that ‘church bells were tolled in the memory of President Kennedy’ and that they preferred Kennedy as the US head of state because they felt they had a ‘mutual understanding’ with him.
U.S. President John F. Kennedy and first lady Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy walk down the steps of Air Force One less than an hour before his assassination
As the nation mourned in disbelief, Oswald was shot and killed in police custody by Jack Ruby
The 1992 JFK Assassination Records Collection Act, signed by President George H.W. Bush, set a 25-year timetable for declassification of assassination records dealing with President Kennedy.
President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed on November 22, 1963, while riding in his motorcade in Dallas, Texas.
As the nation mourned in disbelief, Oswald was shot and killed in police custody by Jack Ruby – forcing Americans to consider whether their government was hiding what it knew of the assassination.
The event remains in the nation’s living memory for a significant slice of the country. Forty-nine million Americans, or 15 percent of the country, are age 65 and over, according to the Census Bureau. They were around age 11 or older at the time.
The Warren Commission did little to settle the matter. Theories abounded that Oswald’s murder was a cover-up for a conspiracy or government ineptitude. The deadly aim of a lonely, alienated gunman seemed hard to fathom.
“A gnat simply does not kill a lion,” is how Saul Pett of The Associated Press described what was fueling the search for answers. He wrote the introduction to the Warren Report.
Jack Ruby, killer of alleged J.F.K. assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, poses with three of the women from his burlesque club