President Trump tweeted Friday that he hopes the government will be able to release “just about everything” concerning the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy hours after most of the documents were unsealed and released to the public.
In an early-morning tweet, Trump wrote that his administration hopes to promote “great transparency” with the documents’ release. The government released most of the remaining 3,100 files Thursday night at midnight.
“JFK Files are being carefully released. In the end there will be great transparency. It is my hope to get just about everything to public!” Trump tweeted.
The tweet comes hours after a memo from Trump in which he said he had “no choice” but to delay the release of some of the documents at the FBI’s request. The memo states that the remainder of the documents will be released, with minimal redactions, by an April 26, 2018, deadline.
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“I have no choice today but to accept those redactions rather than allow potentially irreversible harm to our nation’s security,” Trump said in the memo to department and agency heads released by the White House.
The 1992 President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act set an Oct. 26, 2017, deadline for releasing thousands of unseen documents relating to the assassination from the National Archives.
In a statement, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that the remaining documents would be released on a “rolling basis” in the weeks ahead.
“The remaining records will be released with agency-proposed redactions on a rolling basis in the coming weeks,” Sanders said in a statement.
“The President has demanded unprecedented transparency from the agencies and directed them to minimize redactions without delay. The National Archives will therefore release more records, with redactions only in the rarest of circumstances, by the deadline of April 26, 2018,” she added.
Kennedy’s 1963 assassination by gunman Lee Harvey Oswald has been the subject of conspiracy theories for more than 50 years.