United States President Donald Trump hinted on Saturday that he does not intend to block the release of some long-withheld documents about former President John F Kennedy’s assassination in 1963.
“Subject to the receipt of further information, I will be allowing, as president, the long-blocked and classified JFK FILES to be opened,” President Trump tweeted on Saturday.
A 1992 legislation about the records of the Kennedy assassination case requires that the millions of pages of investigation documents be published in 25 years. That period ends on October 26.
The National Archives has already released many of the documents, but one final batch of around 3,100 documents remains. Only the US president has the power to allow the papers to remain secret even after Thursday.
Government agencies had been urging Trump to not allow their release, according to The Washington Post. An unnamed official was quoted as saying by Politico that Trump has been under pressure from the Central Intelligence Agency to block the release, possibly to protect the agency’s work and the identity of informants who might still be alive.
On Saturday, the White House said the documents should be made available “in the interest of full transparency unless agencies provide a compelling and clear national security or law enforcement justification otherwise”.
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