United States President Donald Trump has been briefed on the potential release of classified records relating to the assassinations of former US president John F Kennedy, his brother Robert F Kennedy and civil rights visionary Dr Martin Luther King Jr, according to the office of the US Director of National Intelligence.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) also confirmed on Tuesday that it found around 2,400 new, inventoried and digitised documents related to JFK's assassination, which it is now transferring to the US National Archives and Records Administration.
It comes after Mr Trump signed an executive order on January 23, authorising the creation of a plan by February 8 on how the new US administration should publicly declassify the records.
"In accordance with the President's Executive Order, ODNI submitted its plan to the White House," a statement provided to the ABC from Acting Director of National Intelligence Lora Shiao's office said.
Mr Trump is expected to be briefed by the ODNI on how his administration should declassify records relating to the deaths of RFK and Dr King by March 9.
For more than six decades, the assassination of JFK has captured the interest of historians, conspiracy theorists and ordinary civilians as one of the most significant watershed moments in modern US history.
The former president's killing has formed the focus of thousands of books, documentaries, podcasts, TV shows and films.
In 2025, questions remain about what else there is to know about the circumstances surrounding the assassination, why the Trump administration now feels it is necessary to expose the unknown, and what the impact could be of the remaining files altering the only official version of events the world has ever been given.
There are also experts who suggest the evidence surrounding the killing does not validate that version of events, and that the classified files could support alternate theories of how and why the president died.
What do we already know about the JFK assassination?
Most of what is known about how the 35th US president was assassinated was first published a year after his death, in a report from The Warren Commission commissioned by then-president Lyndon B Johnson.
Led by chief justice Earl Warren, the commission investigated in minute detail each aspect that contributed to JFK's killing.
The investigation assessed the political context surrounding the president, the background and movements of the shooter and a minute-by-minute breakdown of the events leading up to, during and after what happened in Dealey Plaza.
It also heard the testimonies of 552 witnesses and culminated in an 882-page final report.
"The assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy on November 22, 1963, was a cruel and shocking act of violence directed against a man, a family, a nation, and against all mankind," that report's first chapter said.
The official account of what happened in Dallas on that day says that at 12:30pm, the president's open limousine drove approximately 41 metres down Elm Street at 11.2 miles per hour (18 kilometres per hour).
The commission report said rifle shots, which witnesses said sounded like fireworks or a car backfiring, then rang out over the plaza.
The president raised his left hand to his throat after the first shot and his wife — Jacqueline Kennedy — yelled out: "Oh, my God, they have shot my husband. I love you, Jack," before trying to flee the vehicle over its rear bonnet.
[JFK map]A frantic scramble then ensued to transport the president's motorcade to the Parkland Memorial Hospital, around 6.5 kilometres away.
He arrived at precisely 12:35pm suffering from two bullet wounds — one in his neck and one in his head "where a sizeable portion of the skull was missing", the report said.
Twenty-five minutes later, the president was declared dead.
The report concluded three shots in total were fired from a 6.5 millimetre Mannlicher-Carcano rifle found on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository at the north-eastern end of Dealey Plaza — behind the direction of travel of the president's motorcade.
One bullet hit the president and then Texan governor John Connally — who was seated in the limousine, a second bullet only struck the president, and a third hit the windshield of the vehicle.
The incident at the plaza was captured entirely on film by amateur photographer Abraham Zapruder.
The report determined the sole shooter was Lee Harvey Oswald, who also killed Dallas Police patrolman J D Tippit 45 minutes later.
Oswald was arrested 80 minutes after the assassination, and was then assassinated himself by a man named Jack Ruby on November 24, 1963.
The formal version of the events, to this day, state that there was "no evidence that anyone assisted Oswald in planning or carrying out the assassination."
Despite that, conspiracy theories have existed ever since which try to explain how the killing happened and who was responsible.
The most prominent theories suggest the assassination involved two shooters firing in opposite directions, and the involvement of Cuba, the mafia or US government agencies in committing or aiding the killing.
In a bid to promote transparency decades after the commission, the US Congress passed a law in 1992 ordering all records relating to the assassination to be stored by the National Archives and made publicly accessible within a 25-year period.
Between 1994 and 1998, a review board facilitated the release of around 3 million records but when Mr Trump took office in 2017 there were still more than 15,000 classified documents yet to be seen by the public.
Since then, five tranches of records have been released by Mr Trump and Joe Biden during their presidencies.
At least 99 per cent of the more than 5 million pages of records are now believed to have been declassified, but as many as 4,000 documents are still redacted or hidden from the public.
Why is Donald Trump declassifying the remaining JFK files now?
When Mr Trump signed an executive order to finalise the declassification of all remaining records relating to the deaths of JFK, RFK and Dr King, he said it was because "more than 50 years after these assassinations, the victims' families and the American people deserve the truth."
"President Trump finds that continued withholding of the John F. Kennedy records is not in the public interest and is long overdue," the order said.
Just days into his second presidential term, Mr Trump declared while signing the order in the Oval Office that "everything will be revealed".
Dr Emma Shortis, the Director of The Australia Institute's International and Security Affairs Program, says the three assassinations in the 1960s dealt a major blow to "how Americans imagine themselves".
She said Mr Trump is playing into a sense of paranoia about how such high-profile killings could happen in what is supposedly "the best country in the world".
"The assassination of those young men is, in the American imagination, a devastating loss of promise, a devastating loss of a particular future for the United States," Dr Shortis told the ABC.
"The assassination of JFK falls very easily into that conspiracy thinking, because how could something like that happen if you live in the best country in the world?
"That is what Donald Trump has tapped into so effectively around his talk of the deep state and the national security state and the administrative state — that's a huge part of his political appeal."
Dr Shortis also said part of Mr Trump's motivation appears to be to reward a voter base who helped return him to the Oval Office, as well as Robert F Kennedy Jr — who has long cast doubt on the official account of the assassinations of his father and his uncle.
"He didn't do this last time [during his first administration] … And that was seen as part of a bigger betrayal by a very big part of the movement that supports Donald Trump, particularly the libertarian movement and conspiracists.
"So, what he's doing with this is telegraphing to those people that it's different this time around."
Jefferson Morley, a former Washington Post journalist and the vice-president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation — the largest source in the US of online records of JFK's killing — also believes Mr Trump's decision appears to be motivated entirely by politics.
"Bobby Kennedy (RFK Jr) had star power, which Trump likes — he wants to share in that. For Trump, this was good politics," Mr Morley said.
"Everything is transactional with Trump, he would trade the JFK files for something in a second… It fits in with his project of 'promises made, promises delivered'."
The move has, however, been criticised by JFK's grandson Jack Schlossberg and also members of Martin Luther King Jr's family.
"The truth is a lot sadder than the myth — a tragedy that didn't need to happen," Mr Schlossberg wrote in a post to X on January 23,
"Declassification is using JFK as a political prop, when he's not here to punch back. There's nothing heroic about it."
When could the remaining JFK files be made public?
It could be many months, or even years, before the public sees any of the remaining JFK files in full, according to Mr Morley.
He said that since the hours immediately after JFK's death, federal agencies have pushed back against US governments in trying to keep sensitive information about the killing hidden.
He believes the Trump administration could continue to face "a fight" with organisations like the CIA to declassify the files.
"There will be a struggle within the Trump administration between people who want full disclosure, absolutely… and people who say this is national security information — we can't do it," Mr Morley said.
"The fact that there isn't a plan yet is already a sign that there's push back.
"The national security agencies knew that they weren't going to execute Trump's order. They were going to smoke walk it because they want this stuff out and they don't care if Trump says 'full and complete disclosure'.
"It's going to take a little while, and that alone will tell you the ability of these agencies to resist full disclosure."
What could the Trump administration find in the JFK Files?
Until the remaining documents are declassified, very little is currently known about what remains hidden in them but their release is not likely to bring an end to theorising about the death of JFK, Dr Shortis said.
She also believes it is very unlikely there will be a "smoking gun" revelation that alters the official account of the assassination.
Despite that, Dr Shortis said if there was a revelation it would cause a major ideological rift within the US.
"That would be the ultimate confirmation to conspiracy theorists … around the role of the deep state in undermining the United States," she told the ABC.
"It would have incredible and hard-to-predict reverberations through the national security state, in particular, which is already in upheaval.
"I think also, the grief that would sweep through the United States … would be enormous, it would be devastating."
Mr Morley believes there could be "dramatic revelations" made, including the potential involvement of national agencies like the CIA.
He said former CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton had a 180-page background file prepared on Oswald, and the agency had been surveilling him since 1959.
That begins to debunk the idea that the CIA were unaware of Oswald prior to JFK's assassination, and the remaining files could provide evidence to unwind the "lone gunman" theory.
"It's not a stretch, it's not crazy. Harry Truman thought the CIA was involved, LBJ said to one of his aides that he thought the CIA was involved. Nixon suspected it," Mr Morley said.
"[The official] scenario is disproved by the medical evidence, the eyewitness evidence, the forensic evidence. That's not what happened. The doctors who tried to save Kennedy's life were unanimous — he was hit by gunfire from two different directions.
Despite official accounts to the contrary, Mr Morley is adamant.
"In time we will have a very different consensus about what happened and it will be very different than today's consensus that the lone gunman theory must be true.
"That's going to change and it's going to be: The president was probably killed by enemies in his own government."
