The publication of secret files: What can we learn about the execution of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy?

“And everything will be discovered,” said Trump while his pen signed the command.

The announcement was to fulfill a promise of Trump's campaign, giving the public access to everything the federal government knows about President John F's murders. Kennedy in 1963, as well as Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. But new information may not satisfy people who hope to completely remove the curtain of mystery surrounding these murders during one of the darkest periods in American history, fuelling decades of conspiracy theories.

“The data will not reveal any clear evidence,” said Tom Samoluk for CNN's subsidiary, W CVB, Thursday.

Samoluk is one of the people who has had the opportunity to see JFK's secret files, reviewing them in the 1990s as part of a government panel to decide what could be published. He is now a board member of the John F Library Foundation. Kennedy.

The “will have some parts of the puzzle that will be restored, which will tell a richer and more complete story,” said Samoluk.

Here's what we know so far:

Past Proposal Promises Disclaration off 

The process of publicising the great mountain of federal investigative documentation on the murder of John F. Kennedy was set in motion in 1992, when Congress adopted a law requiring the publishing of documents, unless the president determined it would harm national interests.

The original deadline for opening documents was in 2017, during Trump's first term. At that time, he ordered a six-month review of the national security implications of a full publication and later announced that some documents would remain secret, citing concerns about national security, law enforcement and foreign affairs.

Trump's new executive order does not immediately publish the files, but gives the director of national intelligence and general prosecutor 15 days to submit a plan to the President for full and complete publication of data related to the murder of President John F. Kennedy.” A similar review of MLK and RFK files is expected to be completed within 45 days.

Many still do not believe that a single person killed JFK 

The official government investigation into the murder of JFK by the Warren Commission was intended to close the chapter on the murder that ended the presidency of Camelot, America. But his conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone has never satisfied some Americans' desire for a more meaningful answer to his death.

Conspiracy theories have flourished over six decades since the assassination of President Kennedy, inspiring a nominated film for Oscar and a large number of books and websites. The percentage of Americans who believe others were involved in a conspiracy to kill the president has never fallen below 50%, according to Gallup polls conducted over the years.

The murder of three beloved public figures within five years shocked the nation, causing many to wonder how all of them could have been killed by one person. By 1976, alternative explanations had taken so much momentum that the House of Representatives established a committee to investigate the killings of the JFK and Martin Luther King Jr.

The committee's final report, published in 1979, determined that Kennedy “was probably killed as a result of a conspiracy,” although the panel could not identify any conspiracy. A later analysis by the National Academy of Sciences rejected the acoustic evidence the committee had used to conclude that there was another weapon.

Journalist Gerald Posner, who previously believed in a conspiracy theory for JFK, but then defended the theory of the assassin alone after research for his book “Cassed,” said he does not expect his opinion to change again.

Posner believes publishing documents will be more embarrassing than revealing to the government. Partly edited documents suggest that the Central Intelligence Agency had monitored Oswald when he visited the Cuban consulate in Mexico City several weeks before the assassination, he said.

“Did they know how unstable and dangerous he was?” said Posner told CNN on Friday. Then the question is, hey, you knew it was a powder barrel. Why didn't you inform the FBI when he returned to the U.S.?

Since 2017, over 70,000 documents related to the JFK assassination have been published and posted on the National Archives website. In 2023, 99% of classified documents related to the JFK assassination had already been published, according to the White House.

Posner doubts that the lack of clear evidence in final documents will completely erase other theories on the way and the reason Kennedy's murder.

I've spoken enough with conspiracy theories over the years to understand that they mean either that the evidence has been destroyed, or that they are located elsewhere,” said Posner.

Most files for RRF has already been published 

Exactly what Robert F. Kennedy's what wasn't independently investigated by Congress is much more unclear.

In theory, all documents on the RFK's murder were transferred by several local agencies and the FBI to California State Archives in the late 1980s, said Tim Tate, a British author who co-written a book on murder after her investigation for more than a quarter century. “If there are documents that are not yet revealed, it represents a huge lack of trust from any agency that held them,” he said.

The Los Angeles Police Department has acknowledged that it has destroyed some evidence that was not used in court after the sentence of Sirhan Sirhan '%, who is still serving a life sentence in a San Diego prison involving a door frame and ceiling plates that may have been damaged by bullets in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, where Kennedy was shot to death.

“The destruction of these relevant materials... reflects a serious lack of judgment by authorities that destroyed such material,” said in a 1977 report by the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office.

The only relevant agency that has not submitted documents on Robert F. Kennedy is the CIA, Tate said. “If these are really documents Trump intends to declassify, they may be interesting discoveries: there is ample evidence of a mutual animosity between the Agency and RFK, as well as of its alleged involvement in the assassination,” he told CNN via email.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., son of the late senator and current Trump candidate to run the Human Health and Services Department, has said in several interviews that he does not believe Sirhan killed his father, blaming one of his father's security guards instead.

Thank you, President Trump, for trusting American citizens and taking the first step towards the return of this catastrophic trajectory,” said in an X post Friday, a day after the announcement.

Sirhan, who initially acknowledged that he had shot Kennedy before he later said he did not remember what had happened, was recommended for parole in 2021 after 15 denials, but Governor Gavin Newsom refused, saying: “He has failed to address the shortcomings that led him to kill Senator Kennedy. ”

MLK family wants to postpone publication 

Publicly, Martin Luther King Jr. issued a statement Thursday, saying he hopes to see documents ahead of their publication. For us, killing our father is a deeply personal family loss we have faced over the past 56 years,” was said in the family statement. “We hope that we will be able to examine the files as a family before their publication. ”

But a source of knowledge over discussions on declassifying documents related to King's murder told CNN that the family would prefer the government to wait for their publication. The source said the family wants to honour an earlier agreement with the government to keep them classified by a later date.

King's youngest son, Dexter King, said in 1997 that he believed his father's killer was not James Earl Ray, who was serving a 99-year prison sentence for the murder of King. At a face-to-face meeting with Dexter King, Ray said he had not carried out the murder, though he added: “Sometimes these questions have difficult answers. ”

Ray a bum and a criminal massacre escaped the country after King's death and was captured in England. He pleaded guilty to King's murder in 1969, but withdrew it almost immediately after his sentence.

Ray died in Tennessee in 1998 while serving his sentence. Dexter King passed away from cancer last year.

The Chamber for Murder's Chosen Committee report also stated that there is “perhaps a conspiracy” in King's death, not to mention any other suspects. But the federal investigation was not satisfactory for many members of King's family and his associates, who were aware of the FBI's long-term investigation into Director J. Edgar Hoover towards him as a potential Communist influence.

Hoover called King “the most popular liar in the country”, and declassified documents later showed that Hoover had authorized surveillance of the house and the King's office, including “attempts to intimidate him, to destroy his marriage and direct and indirect efforts to blackmail him. ”

Ironically, some of the King surveillance was approved by Robert F. Kennedy himself, when he served as a general prosecutor, something that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He's been protecting her ever since.

Former UN ambassador Andrew Young, one of King's closest associates, told CNN in 2008 that he believed a government conspiracy was at the heart of the murder, whether Ray had pressed the trigger or not.

I think there was a decision at very high levels that our movement had to stop,” said Young. “This certainly went to the FBI. ”

If the latest collection of documents on the murders of King and Kennedy will show new evidence of a conspiracy or just more mystery is a question that seems to be receiving answers within weeks.