By Maria Maaloof

“You’ve got a lot of reading.” This was what President Donald Trump said to the lawyers at the Justice Department when he was giving them the instructions to release the rest of the documents related to the assassination of former American President John F. Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States, on Friday, November 22nd, 1963. President Trump gave further notices to the top officials at the Justice Department’s National Security Division. He told them, “You’ve got a lot of reading. I don’t believe we’re going to redact anything. I said, ‘Just don’t redact. You can’t redact.’” Redacting is the effort to remove, hide or manipulate critical data and information from an official document for the purpose of safeguarding the confidentiality, the privacy, and the integrity of a person or an organization, and it is widely employed in the context of the release of government documents.  

President Trump delivered these remarks while visiting the opera house in Washington, D.C., known as the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, on Monday, March 17, 2025. The time deadline is the next day. This created a huge burden on the DOJ’s staff to declassify, unearth, and publish the rest of the documents that relate to the FBI’s investigation of the Kennedy killing. 

Nevertheless, this was not a surprising order. Right after he was sworn in as president, Trump signed an executive order that stated clearly the requirement for the “full and complete release of records relating to the assassination of President Kennedy.” It is estimated that the total size of these papers are 80,000 pages. Many of them were released across the years.

However, there are many important implications for President Trump’s commitment to release the Kennedy assassination’s documents. It shows his dedication to make the workings of the United States Federal Government transparent. This what his Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said. In addition, the papers will revisit the mystery surrounding the assassination of JFK. Many people will read these documents differently and give varied interpretations of them.

Significantly, it demonstrates President Trump’s pledge to fight the deep state. 
Since the assassination of John Kennedy in 1963, the deep state definition has been used to refer to “a hybrid association of government elements and parts of top-level industry and finance that is effectively able to govern the United States without reference to the consent of the governed as expressed through the formal political process.” 

This confirms as well the courage of President Trump to confront head on high-stake political issues. The assassination of Kennedy has been the subject of so much debate, and such an acrimonious polemics has not been settled yet. Simply put, President Trump wants the American people and the whole world to know the truth about this tragic incident in America’s modern history. 

It is believed that the Warren Commission Report had been edited several times before it was announced to the public to account for the John Kennedy killing. This might verify what Trump has been accusing the deep state of: that it conceals many important facts related to the American Government which should be known to the American people.

Personally, I think that the publication of this huge volume of papers will recast the story over the motives of Lee Harvey Oswald shooting Kennedy. The Warren Commission concluded that Oswald acted alone. Such a judgment could be well nullified. Dramatically, two days after he shot Kennedy, Oswald himself was shot and killed by Jack Ruby while being escorted by the police in Dallas, Texas.

The American people will have a different experience of how their government functions. This what President Trump desires and he wants that experience to be a positive one. The America public feels quite often frustrated by the lack of honesty on the part of government’s officials when it comes to crises such as epidemics, spying, foreign wars, violent protest by demonstrators and other forms of public events and incidents. President Trump is putting an end to these wrong practices of government policy. Trump is proving that a democracy must not have an entrenched and lying establishment, and at the same time, he is advocating that conspiracy theories should not be the imagined facts that people entertain in their minds.