WASHINGTON — President Trump said Monday that he’s set to release 80,000 files on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on Tuesday — a trove that’s expected to be pored over by history buffs and conspiracy theorists.
Trump made the remark while visiting the Kennedy Center performing arts hub in Washington.
“While we’re here, I thought it would be appropriate there tomorrow, announcing and giving all of the Kennedy files,” 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.”
Trump added: “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.”
The president said the files would be “very interesting,” though The Post has learned that an initial review by administration officials turned up no new bombshells.
Kennedy was shot in November 1963 in Dallas — with prime suspect Lee Harvey Oswald murdered two days later by nightclub owner Jack Ruby, spurring debate about whether Oswald was a patsy in a larger conspiracy.
Oswald defected to the Soviet Union four years before the assination and later returned to the US. In late September 1963, the Marine Corps veteran visited the Cuban Consulate in Mexico City and contacted the Soviet embassy there.
Less than two weeks before the assassination, Oswald wrote to the Soviet embassy in Washington, complaining: “[H]ad I been able to reach the Soviet Embassy in Havana, as planned, the embassy there would have had time to complete our business.”
A CIA document released under a separate order by Trump in 2017 said: “Although it appears that [Oswald] was then thinking only about a peaceful change of residence to the Soviet Union, it is also possible that he was getting documented to make a quick escape after assassinating the president.”
Ruby’s links to organized crime also provided another breeding ground for JFK conspiracy theories.
Trump also has ordered the release of documents pertaining to the 1968 assassinations of then-Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (D-NY) and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.
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