Trump signs order to declassify JFK, MLK and RFK assassination files
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(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday to declassify files related to the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King.
“That’s a big one,” Trump said as put his signature to the order in the Oval Office. He asked an aide standing nearby to give the marker to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who he’s nominated to be secretary of Health and Human Services.
Trump has long vowed to make the information public. He released a trove of documents in 2017 related to the 1963 killing of John F. Kennedy but left some of it redacted based on recommendations from the CIA and FBI.
A 1992 law passed by Congress required the release of the JFK files by 2017 unless the president authorized that they be withheld longer.
According to the White House text of the order, Trump has “now determined that the continued redaction and withholding of information” on JFK “is not consistent with the public interest and the release of these records is long overdue.”
“And although no Act of Congress directs the release of information pertaining to the assassinations of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I have determined that the release of all records in the Federal Government’s possession pertaining to each of those assassinations is also in the public interest,” the order states.
The records, however, will not immediately be made available.
The order gives the director of national intelligence and attorney general 15 days to present a plan to Trump for the “full and complete” release of records for JFK and 45 days for a plan for the RFK and MLK documents.
The Biden administration also released documents related to JFK’s assassination — more than 13,000 of them.
At the time, the National Archives said more than 97% of records in the collection, which contain more than 5 million pages, were publicly available. The CIA also said that 95% of its collection had been released, and that no documents remained entirely redacted.
In 2023, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called on then-President Joe Biden to release all the files related to his uncle’s assassination.
Last year, as he ran for president first as a Democrat then as an independent before endorsing Trump, RFK Jr. pushed a conspiracy theory that the CIA was directly involved in the assassination of JFK.
When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stood on stage with Trump in August after making his endorsement, Trump announced he would establish a “a new independent presidential commission on assassination attempts” tasked with releasing “all remaining documents pertaining to President John F. Kennedy’s assassination and other events in question.”
JFK was shot and killed in November 1963 during a visit to Dallas at the hands of Lee Harvey Oswald.
RFK and MLK were killed in 1968. RFK was shot on the night he won the 1968 California Democratic presidential primary by Sirhan Sirhan. King was killed in Memphis, where he was supporting a sanitation workers strike, by James Earl Ray.
“Lot of people are waiting for this for a long — for years and decades,” Trump said as he signed the order on Thursday.
(WASHINGTON) — A former top Justice Department immigration official who was removed from her position by new DOJ leadership this week told ABC News that she did not receive any explanation for her removal.
Lauren Alder Reid was one of four top officials from the agency that operates the U.S. immigration courts who was removed from her post. She had been with the agency for more than 14 years.
“They did not give me any reason, other than not citing the 16 years of outstanding performance evaluation for lack of any discipline, administrative leave or reassignment in my entire career,” Reid told ABC News.
The firings come as President Donald Trump has signed a flurry of immigration executive orders after vowing on the campaign trail to clamp down on immigration and undo Biden-era policies.
When asked if she’s considering legal action, Reid, who was the assistant director of the Executive Office for Immigration Review’s office of policy, said that she and the others are considering all options available to them.
“It’s pretty hard to sit back and imagine that this could begin to happen, at will, to any employee throughout the government, especially when we’re talking about public servants who have dedicated their careers to try to make our country the best,” she said.
The Justice Department employs about 700 immigration judges who decide whether migrants seeking asylum in the United States can remain in the country legally. There is currently an historic backlog of 3.5 million cases.
Reid said drastic reform is needed to address the backlog, saying, “Congress needs to act.”
Asked what message her removal sends to other career officials in the federal government, Reid said that employees are fearful. “If fear is what they wanted, that’s what they’re getting,” Reid said.
(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump on Thursday claimed, without citing evidence, that diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives for air traffic controllers at the Federal Aviation Administration — under Democratic presidents — were partly to blame for the tragic plane and helicopter collision in Washington on Wednesday night.
The air disaster occurred as an American Airlines passenger jet approaching Reagan Washington National Airport collided with a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter on a routine training flight.
“I put safety first, Obama, Biden and the Democrats put policy first, and they put politics at a level that nobody’s ever seen,” Trump told reporters in the White House briefing room, referring to the policies, even as the investigation into what happened is just getting underway.
This is the first major commercial airline crash in the United States since 2009, when 50 people died after a plane crashed while landing near Buffalo Niagara International Airport.
“I had to say that it’s terrible,” he said, citing what he called a story about a group within the FAA that had “determined that the [FAA] workforce was too white, that they had concerted efforts to get the administration to change that and to change it immediately. This was in the Obama administration, just prior to my getting there, and we took care of African Americans, Hispanic Americans.”
Trump then signed an executive order later Thursday that appointed Christopher Rocheleau, a 22-year veteran of the FAA, as acting commissioner of the agency, which he had said he would do in the briefing. And he signed a second executive order “aimed at undoing all of that damage” caused by the “Biden administration’s DEI and woke policies.”
“We want the most competent people. We don’t care what race they are,” the president said. “If they don’t have a great brain, a great power of the brain, they’re not going to be very good at what they do and bad things will happen.”
When asked in the earlier briefing by ABC News Chief White House Correspondent Mary Bruce whether he was saying the crash was the result of diversity hiring, Trump said, “we don’t know” what caused the crash, adding investigators are still looking into that. “It just could have been. We have a high standard. We’ve had a higher, much higher standard than anybody else.”
Even as he made unfounded claims about the FAA’s diversity initiatives being a factor in the disaster, he said the Army helicopter crew could be at fault — and claimed he wasn’t blaming the air traffic controller who communicated with the helicopter.
When asked how he could come to the conclusion that FAA diversity policies had something to do with the disaster, he said, “Because I have common sense, OK, and unfortunately a lot of people don’t.”
DEI and any similar programs do not apply to air traffic control hiring, though — no one is given preferential treatment for race, sex, ethnicity or sexual orientation, a former FAA official told ABC News.
Applicants must pass a medical exam, an aptitude test and a psychological test that is more stringent than that required of a pilot, said Chris Wilbanks, FAA deputy vice president of safety and technical training.
In 2022, 57,000 people applied for an ATC position, Wilbanks said, and 2,400 qualified to attend the academy. Of that 2,400, only 1,000 made it to the first day of training.
Wilbanks said 72% make it through the academy and roughly 60% of those will finish training.
According to the FAA, the training process lasts about three to four years from the hire date. Applicants must be younger than 31 and must retire by age 55.
Anyone who has taken Ritalin or Adderall in the last three years doesn’t qualify, the former FAA official said.
No determination of fault in the crash has been made, and the National Transportation Safety Board is conducting an investigation.
However, the NTSB declined to say whether DEI initiatives were a factor in the crash when asked by reporters later Thursday.
“As part of any investigation, we look at the human, the machine and the environment,” NTSB Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy said. “So we will look at all the humans that were involved in this accident. Again, we will look at the aircraft. We will look at the helicopter. We will look at the environment in which they were operating in. That is part of that is standard in any part of our investigation.”
In the White House briefing, several Cabinet officials spoke after Trump to address the crash, with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy saying, “What happened yesterday shouldn’t have happened.”
“And when Americans take off in airplanes, they should expect to land at their destination,” he added. “That didn’t happen yesterday. That’s not acceptable, and so we will not accept excuses. We will not accept passing the buck. We are going to take responsibility at the Department of Transportation and the FAA to make sure we have the reforms that have been dictated by President Trump in place to make sure that these mistakes do not happen again.”
However, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, while noting that a “mistake was made” in the crash, said the Department of Defense must be “colorblind and merit-based … whether it’s flying Black Hawks, and flying airplanes, leading platoons or in government.”
“The era of DEI is gone at the Defense Department, and we need the best and brightest, whether it’s in our air traffic control or whether it’s in our generals, or whether it’s throughout government,” he said.
Vice President JD Vance, too, alluded to DEI having a part in the crash, saying, “We want the best people at air traffic control.”
“If you go back to just some of the headlines over the past 10 years, you have many hundreds of people suing the government because they would like to be air traffic controllers, but they were turned away because of the color of their skin,” Vance said. “That policy ends under Donald Trump’s leadership, because safety is the first priority of our aviation industry.”
But when a reporter pressed Trump, saying that similar language on DEI policies existed on the FAA’s website under Trump’s entire first term, Trump shot back, “I changed the Obama policy, and we had a very good policy and then Biden came in and he changed it. And then when I came in two days, three days ago, I said, a new order, bringing it to the highest level of intelligence.”
Trump said Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary in the Biden administration, “just got a good line of bulls—” and said he had “run [the Department of Transportation] right into the ground with his diversity.”
“Despicable. As families grieve, Trump should be leading, not lying,” Buttigieg responded in a statement on X. “We put safety first, drove down close calls, grew Air Traffic Control, and had zero commercial airline crash fatalities out of millions of flights on our watch. President Trump now oversees the military and the FAA. One of his first acts was to fire and suspend some of the key personnel who helped keep our skies safe. Time for the President to show actual leadership and explain what he will do to prevent this from happening again.”
Illinois Rep. Robin Kelly called Trump’s comments “dangerous, racist, and ignorant.”
“President Trump twisted a terrible tragedy — while families are mourning their loved ones — to insert his own political agenda and sow division,” Kelly said in a statement. “This is not leadership. We need to investigate how this plane crash happened to give a sense of closure to grieving families and prevent future crashes.
“Trump would rather point fingers than look in the mirror and face the fact that he just cut a committee responsible for aviation security,” she added. “The issue with our country is not its diversity. It’s the lack of leadership in the White House and unqualified Cabinet. Trump’s actions and words are dangerous, racist, and ignorant — simply un-American.”
(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump and key members of his administration are lashing out at judges who have halted some of his second-term agenda, suggesting they don’t have the authority to question his executive power.
So far, the courts have pushed back on Trump’s attempts to end birthright citizenship, freeze federal grants, and the overhaul of federal agencies like USAID and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Over the weekend, the administration hit another roadblock when a federal judge temporarily restricted Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from accessing the Treasury Department’s vast federal payment system, which contains sensitive information of millions of Americans.
Musk accused the judge of being “corrupt” and called for him to be immediately impeached.
Vice President JD Vance, as he’s done before, questioned judicial oversight of the executive branch. In an interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos last year, Vance suggested a president can ignore a court’s order — even a Supreme Court order — he considers illegitimate.
“If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal. If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that’s also illegal. Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” Vance said over the weekend.
Trump was asked on Sunday about Vance’s comments and some of his setbacks in court.
“When a president can’t look for fraud and waste and abuse, we don’t have a country anymore,” Trump told reporters. “So, we’re very disappointed, but with the judges that would make such a ruling. But we have a long way to go.”
“No judge should, frankly, be allowed to make that kind of a decision,” the president added. “It’s a disgrace.”
Their pushback against the judiciary comes as Trump and his allies assert a sweeping theory of presidential power, one they say gives him sole control of the executive branch. Legal experts told ABC News they believe the Trump administration is trying to set up cases to test that theory before the Supreme Court.
Democrats say Trump is trying to subvert checks and balances under the U.S. Constitution, including the role of Congress in setting the scope of federal agencies and conducting oversight.
“I think this is the most serious constitutional crisis the country has faced certainly since Watergate,” Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy said on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday. “The president is attempting to seize control of power, and for corrupt purposes.”
California Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff responded directly to Vance’s suggestion judges aren’t “allowed to control” Trump’s executive power on X, writing: “JD, we both went to law school. But we don’t have to be lawyers to know that ignoring court decisions we don’t like puts us on a dangerous path to lawlessness.”
Republicans are largely aligned behind the president. Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton slammed the judge who blocked DOGE’s access to Treasury data as an “outlaw.” Rep. Jim Jordan, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, largely defended Musk’s actions as “carrying out the will” of Trump on CNN on Sunday.
Michael Gerhardt, a constitutional law expert at the University of North Carolina, told ABC News Trump’s rhetoric is largely “bravado” as “judges are entitled to review the constitutionality of presidential actions.”
“The conflict between the Trump administration and the courts is not just brewing; it is likely to persist throughout his second term,” Gerhardt said, noting Trump has a long history of criticizing judges with whom he disagrees even if they were appointed by Republican presidents.
“I think this battle will define Trump’s presidency,” Gerhardt added.
