The FBI has found new documents about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, as President Trump pushes to bring full transparency to one of the most scrutinized events in U.S. history.
After Trump signed an executive order to declassify all documents about the shooting, the FBI said it identified 2,400 new records in a search.
“The search resulted in approximately 2,400 newly inventoried and digitized records that were previously unrecognized as related to the JFK assassination case file,” the bureau said in a statement.
The government has long resisted transparency into the assassination, which has helped fuel speculation of a cover-up. Sources told Axios that efforts are still underway to block out details of the new files.
"When POTUS hears about this stonewalling, he's gonna hit the roof," a White House official told Axios.
During his first term, Trump released nearly 3,000 records about the assassination but withheld others after consulting with the CIA.
While a 1992 law required all records about the assassination to be released by 2017, about 3,000 files remain under wraps.
The details of the what the new records contain were not shared with Axios, which first reported that 14,000 pages were uncovered.
"This is huge. It shows the FBI is taking this seriously," said Jefferson Morley, an expert on the assassination and vice president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation. "The FBI is finally saying, 'Let's respond to the president's order,' instead of keeping the secrecy going."
The significance of the new documents is unknown, but they may shed light on George Joannides, a CIA officer based in Miami who led a group of Cuban exiles who had encounters with Oswald before Kennedy's assassination. Joannides was later accused of misleading a 1978 House committee that investigated the assassination.
"The Joannides file sounds exactly like the newly discovered FBI files," Morley said. "It's something assassination-related that was never turned over to the Archives."
Trump's executive order calls for full transparency into the assassinations of Kennedy, his brother Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr.
President Kennedy was assassinated while riding in his motorcade through Dallas, Texas in November 1963, in one of the most shocking moments in American history.
The Warren Commission established that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone shooter, but conspiracy theories have persisted for decades since.
A 2023 Gallup poll found that a majority of Americans believe Kennedy was murdered as part of a wider conspiracy.
