Trump’s Historic Executive Order on JFK, RFK, and MLK documents

Three days after taking office as the 47th President, Donald J. Trump took the bold and necessary step of issuing an Executive Order that will result in the declassification (and one presumes the release) of all intelligence community files on the JFK, RFK, and MLK assassinations.


Thus, President Trump made good on a 2024 campaign promise. It’s a vision of transparency compared to the obfuscation of the Biden administration. In fact, President Biden issued an Executive Order in 2023 that seemed to close the remaining files forever. Trump has saved the day for those of us who want to know the secrets that remain in the final 3-percent of the 5 million pages of withheld documents.


Unfortunately there are many thousands of files on the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King, and likely a lesser number on JFK that are not subject to President Trump’s Order. This category of files is property of the U.S. House of Representatives, and not subject to executive branch action according to the National Archives.


These files were created during the investigation conducted by the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) from 1976-79 during the 94th and 95th Congress. The HSCA was created to re-open the JFK investigation and to conduct a full investigation of the Martin Luther King assassination since there never was a proper investigation from the start. The HSCA failed to conduct a legitimate investigation of either case, and actually altered evidence in the MLK case which I have exposed and documented in my two books on the King assassination. When the HSCA mandate expired as the 96th Congress took office on January 3, 1979, the evidentiary files in the committee’s possession were sealed by House rule for 50 years.  That means they will not be available to the public until at least January 3, 2029 unless released by the House.
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I have worked the last decade to raise awareness of the need for the Speaker of the House to release the sealed documents. These files are material in understanding who did what, who’s responsible for what, and who ordered what. They are vital to the truth because the HSCA Final Report merely characterized the evidence but revealed very little of it. It’s high time for us to see the evidence ourselves.


One of the pertinent documents needlessly sealed is a Tennessee Bureau of Investigation report into the correspondence of James Earl Ray in the early months he was incarcerated in state prison in Nashville. As I explain in my book, the original TBI report was removed from the Tennessee Archives by HSCA in the 1970s and never returned. It is relegated to a footnote in the HSCA volumes as an ignominious reference, “MLK Document 200472.” Twice the Senate of the Tennessee General Assembly has passed resolutions asking for the return of property that rightfully belongs to the citizens of Tennessee, without success. One resolution was ignored by Speaker Boehner, the second by Speaker Pelosi.

It’s time for Speaker Johnson to follow President Trump’s lead and release all the HSCA files for the public and researchers to see.
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John Avery Emison is author of The Deep State Assassination of Martin Luther King, (Shotwell, 2023) and Mayor of Alamo, Tennessee. You can reach him at [email protected].