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White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said US President Donald Trump has pledged to restore public trust in the intelligence community, and as part of his commitment, he has declassified and published 80,000 pages of previously classified documents related to the assassination of former US President John F Kennedy.
"President Trump also promised maximum transparency and commitment to rebuild the trust of the American people in our intelligence community. Part of that promise was to fully release previously classified records related to the assassination of Former President John F Kennedy. And he made that happen yesterday," she said. She described the release as 'historic', adding that records not yet digitised would soon be made available. "This historic release consisted of approximately 80,000 pages of previously classified records that are now published. The records are available to access either online on archives.gov/jfk or in person accessible to the American people at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. Records that are currently available for in-person viewing are being digitsed and will be uploaded in the coming days," she said. Many documents related to the assassination had already been disclosed, including a set of 13,000 documents released during Joe Biden's presidency. However, according to CNN, many of the documents released on Tuesday had previously been redacted. Trump said on Monday that "people have been waiting for decades" to see the 80,000 pages of records concerning Kennedy's assassination. Soon after taking office, he signed an executive order directing the public release of thousands of files related to the assassinations of Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr, CNN reported. Tom Samoluk, a former deputy director of the Assassination Records Review Board--a government panel established in the 1990s to examine assassination-related records--was among those who reviewed these documents for public release between 1994 and 1998. From what he examined, Samoluk said there was no new evidence to alter the official conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in Kennedy's assassination. "The collection of records that we reviewed, the vast majority of which were released -- some were kept classified in whole or in part -- if that's what we're talking about, then there is no smoking gun," he told CNN in a phone interview. (ANI)
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