(WASHINGTON) -- he families of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. have spoken out following President Donald Trump signing an executive order on Thursday to declassify files related to their assassinations.
"That's a big one," Trump said as put his signature to the order in the Oval Office. He asked an aide standing nearby to give the marker to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom he's nominated to be secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.
"The 60-year strategy of lies and secrecy, disinformation, censorship, and defamation employed by Intel officials to obscure and suppress troubling facts about JFK's assassination has provided the playbook for a series of subsequent crises -- the MLK and RFK assassinations, Vietnam, 9/11, the Iraq war and COVID -- that have each accelerated the subversion of our exemplary democracy by the Military/Medical Industrial Complex and pushed us further down the road toward totalitarianism," Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has long called for the declassification of the documents, said in a Friday statement.
"A government that withholds information is inherently fearful of its citizens' ability to make informed decisions and participate actively in democracy," he added. "Thank you, President Trump for trusting American citizens and for taking the first step down the road towards reversing this disastrous trajectory."
Trump has long vowed to make the information public. He released a trove of documents in 2017 related to the 1963 killing of John F. Kennedy but left some of it redacted based on recommendations from the CIA and FBI.
A 1992 law passed by Congress required the release of the JFK files by 2017 unless the president authorized that they be withheld longer.
According to the White House text of the order, Trump has "now determined that the continued redaction and withholding of information" on JFK "is not consistent with the public interest and the release of these records is long overdue."
"And although no Act of Congress directs the release of information pertaining to the assassinations of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I have determined that the release of all records in the Federal Government's possession pertaining to each of those assassinations is also in the public interest," the order states.
The records, however, will not immediately be made available.
The order gives the director of national intelligence and attorney general 15 days to present a plan to Trump for the "full and complete" release of records for JFK and 45 days for a plan for the RFK and MLK documents.
"For us, the assassination of our father is a deeply personal family loss that we have endured over the last 56 years," Bernice King, the daughter of MLK Jr., said in a Thursday statement. "We hope to be provided the opportunity to review the files as a family prior to its public release."
The Biden administration also released documents related to JFK's assassination -- more than 13,000 of them.
At the time, the National Archives said more than 97% of records in the collection, which contain more than 5 million pages, were publicly available. The CIA also said that 95% of its collection had been released, and that no documents remained entirely redacted.
In 2023, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called on then-President Joe Biden to release all the files related to his uncle's assassination.
Last year, as he ran for president first as a Democrat then as an independent before endorsing Trump, RFK Jr. pushed a conspiracy theory that the CIA was directly involved in the assassination of JFK.
When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stood on stage with Trump in August after making his endorsement, Trump announced he would establish a "a new independent presidential commission on assassination attempts" tasked with releasing "all remaining documents pertaining to President John F. Kennedy’s assassination and other events in question."
However, Jack Schlossberg, the grandson of JFK, was critical of the decision, posting on X that declassifying the documents is using his grandfather as "a political prop" and that there is "nothing heroic" about the move.
"The truth is alot sadder than the myth — a tragedy that didn't need to happen. Not part of an inevitable grand scheme," Schlossberg said in a Thursday statement. "Declassification is using JFK as a political prop, when he's not here to punch back. There's nothing heroic about it."
JFK was shot and killed in November 1963 during a visit to Dallas at the hands of Lee Harvey Oswald.
RFK and MLK were killed in 1968. RFK was shot on the night he won the 1968 California Democratic presidential primary by Sirhan Sirhan. King was killed in Memphis, where he was supporting a sanitation workers strike, by James Earl Ray.
"Lot of people are waiting for this for a long -- for years and decades," Trump said as he signed the order on Thursday.