My coworking space is a century old hardware distribution building in Birmingham, AL. It's about a 1-2 miles away from the predominantly African American neighborhood that was constantly bombed in the 50s.
I was told the FBI searched the building a few decades ago in the hopes of finding the rifle used in MLK's assassination.
Birmingham was a wild town for many years!
See:
Sec. 3. General Provisions. (a) Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect:
(i) the authority granted by law to an executive department or agency, or the head thereof; or
(ii) the functions of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.
(b) This order shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations.
As others have said, declassification is a process, not a rubber stamp. Declassified records can reference things which are still classified so you need to go through each document line by line and check for such references to make sure they're blanked. Likewise if you want to be particularly helpful you'd have to also go through all previously declassified documents referencing this document and then un-blank their references and republish them, though I doubt that often happens in practice.
JFK stuff was also declassified under Biden. No one cares because there's nothing in it.
1) the CIA and/or FBI knew about the assassination plot and either couldn't, or didn't, stop it -- they failed
or 2) there is a non-zero chance the Dulles brothers engineered it, either deliberately or through deliberate inaction
my guess is #1
You want people to tell the truth to government investigations in the future, and not hold something back because they think in 15 years the government might just release a transcript of everything you told them.
We know who killed JFK
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/671ky4/is_th...
> Yes, the official explanation that Lee Harvey Oswald was, on his own, responsible for murdering President Kennedy is overwhelmingly accepted as correct. It has largely held up to intense scrutiny over the past 50 years and there is no substantial evidence toward any other explanation.
> As I mentioned in my older post linked elsewhere, one of the reasons why there was so much criticism of the official explanation after the fact is that the investigation was not handled well. This resulted in a lot of seemingly contradictory and unexplained information that opened the door to questioning the overall conclusion as a whole.
Classic Trump PR move. Claim he's doing something that's already done and then take credit loudly.
And, yet, they never will.
Why would you not want this to be released?
Weird.
I am personally more interested in the MLK data than the JFK data because flawed though they were, the many eyes on that prize didn't find even the scent of a smoking gun worth much. If it had been the other side of the Iron curtain, by now they'd have capitalised on proving it. The ability to tie that era's democrat party to the mob was too delicious to keep secret if provable. (yes, even being killed by the mob taints you with the mob) so either political, foreign, or crime related I can't see how successive governments could have resisted showing-and-telling all.
MLK, I felt was swept under the carpet the way decent "folk like us" wanted. The moment of political advantage in the facts faded much faster, the underlying unease of what agencies of the state might be complicit remains. I think we all deserve a bit of clarity here. We know he had feet of clay, thats not the point. The point is how poorly the state defended a man trying to build a better america.
Neither are anything like as important as current events. The release is not just a mechanistic "I am a man of my word" moment, its a distraction from the everyday events. Any hour news online dedicates to these stories, is time not spent worrying about what dismantling the US state means in practice in 2025.
Excellent point that I hadn't considered. We're already flooded with executive orders and news of Musk's capricious wrecking ball. Ultimately who killed JFK or MLK doesn't matter all that much today, except as a matter of historical accuracy. But it's something that people will certainly talk about, distracting us from the real dangers going on in this administration.
Ultimately I don't think we'll learn much from this anyway. I expect any juicy documents (if any existed) were destroyed long ago, and the departments in custody of any related files are still free to redact whatever they want, or simply decide not to release the parts they don't want to release.
Another possibility is that the remaining files contain something incredibly damaging to a group or agency he hates. Like say the MLK files implicate the FBI somehow. Trump hates the FBI now (which was not the case during his first term), and files pointing the finger at the FBI would be more ammunition for purging and remaking the FBI.
Oliver Stone cares, of that I am sure.
Come on those would be the most high profile murders in the US in the 20th century?
This post is not political whether you believe or do not believe Trump is up to you.
We used to call this confirmation bias....
Have you considered that releasing these files is just fulfilling a campaign promise? Or that if a non-Trump admin had done this it would've been celebrated?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Harvey_Oswald
Just because the government messed up the first investigation in a rush doesn't change the fact that they came to the correct conclusion as the following decades has shown. It's possible there's something embarrassing to the fbi in those files but it wouldn't be assassination of prominent figures
I'm all for releasing all the known evidence about the case, but a large swath of people will never be satisfied unless they hear exactly what they want to hear. There are still a sizable number of people who think the Moon landings were faked, despite all evidence to the contrary.
He's explicitly at war with the deep state and existing institutions. Trying to tear them down and seize power. If these files make the FBI and/or other TLA(s) look bad, further public eroding trust and support, he wins.
The Republicans are also starting to win back non-white voters. Shedding light on the MLK assassination certainly does not hurt that effort.
The FBI was out for MLK.
In his first term Trump liked the FBI so he allowed them to redact the JFK files he was legally supposed to release to the public.
But in 2025 they’re his bogey man so releasing it so Kash Patel has an even easier time remolding it in his image makes a lot of sense.
If it makes everyone in office look bad then all the better!
Yeah, unless his dementia worsens even more he's not going to release those files.
Now that we also have P-Diddy it makes me wonder just how many high class sleazy pimps with blackmail operations are operating at a given time. This must be a standard racket.
The person that I worked with partied with PD and mirrored some of the same (alleged) sort of toxic and abusive antics in their own home and social circles, which I experienced firsthand. There was a darkness emanating from this person that I haven’t really felt before or since. We ultimately stopped working together due to them violating our contract.
The public allegations so far totally jibe with my experience associating with PDs associates and my limited visibility into the world of PD. I’m very glad to have come to my senses and avoided any closer orbit of this world.
https://www.businessinsider.com/jeffrey-epsteins-ex-girlfrie...
No amount of evidence will ever be enough. See: the moon landings.
Seeing people line up at the curve in the road where he was shot in Dallas was wild. It's literally just a curve in the road going downtown. Nothing remarkable. Too bad he didn't return a few years ago, I guess.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/who-killed-jfk/id17146...
There’s actually a mountain of evidence pointing to a horrifying conclusion.
It’s not easy to summarize, and anyhow I don’t want to give spoilers here.
More interesting to me is who had the motive and opportunity, and this podcast makes a compelling case for who was behind it.
