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Washington Post
4 hours ago
- Politics
- Washington Post
Things to know about the release of federal documents related to MLK's assassination
MEMPHIS, Tenn. — Federal records related to the investigation into the 1968 assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. have been released, following the disclosure in March of tens of thousands of documents about the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy . In January, President Donald Trump ordered the release of thousands of classified governmental documents about Kennedy's assassination, while also moving to declassify federal records related to the deaths of New York Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and King more than five decades ago.
Associated Press
14 hours ago
- Politics
- Associated Press
Things to know about the release of federal documents related to MLK's assassination
MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) — Federal records related to the investigation into the 1968 assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. were released on Monday, following the disclosure in March of tens of thousands of documents about the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In January, President Donald Trump ordered the release of thousands of classified governmental documents about Kennedy's assassination, while also moving to declassify federal records related to the deaths of New York Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and King more than five decades ago. Trump ordered Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and Attorney General Pam Bondi to coordinate with other government officials to review records related to the assassinations of RFK and King, and present a plan to the president for their 'complete release.' Some 10,000 pages of records about the RFK assassination were released April 18. Justice Department attorneys later asked a federal judge to end a sealing order for the records nearly two years ahead of its expiration date. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which King led, is opposed to unsealing any of the records for privacy reasons. The organization's lawyers said King's relatives also wanted to keep the files under seal. Scholars, history buffs and journalists have been preparing to study the documents to find new information about the civil rights leader's assassination on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee. The King family's statement released after Trump's order in January said they hoped to get an opportunity to review the files as a family prior to its public release. King's family, including his two living children, Martin III and Bernice, was given advance notice of the release and had their own teams reviewing the records ahead of the public disclosure. In a statement released Monday, King's children called their father's case a 'captivating public curiosity for decades.' But they also emphasized the personal nature of the matter and urged that 'these files must be viewed within their full historical context.' 'We ask those who engage with the release of these files to do so with empathy, restraint, and respect for our family's continuing grief,' the statement said. Here is what we know about the assassination and what scholars had to say ahead of the release of the documents. In Memphis, shots ring out King was standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, heading to dinner with a few friends, when he was shot and killed. King had been in Memphis to support a sanitation workers strike protesting poor working conditions and low pay. The night before the assassination, King delivered the famous 'Mountaintop' speech on a stormy night at the Mason Temple in Memphis. An earlier march on Beale Street had turned violent, and King had returned to Memphis to lead another march as an expression of nonviolent protest. King also had been planning the Poor People's Campaign to speak out against economic injustice. The FBI's investigation After a long manhunt, James Earl Ray was captured in London, and he pleaded guilty to assassinating King. He later renounced that plea and maintained his innocence until his death in 1998. FBI documents released over the years show how the bureau wiretapped King's telephone lines, bugged his hotel rooms and used informants to get information against him. 'He was relentlessly targeted by an invasive, predatory, and deeply disturbing disinformation and surveillance campaign,' the King family statement said. King family's response to the investigation Members of King's family, and others, have questioned whether Ray acted alone, or if he was even involved. King's widow, Coretta Scott King, asked for the probe to be reopened, and in 1998, then-Attorney General Janet Reno directed the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department to do so. The Justice Department said it 'found nothing to disturb the 1969 judicial determination that James Earl Ray murdered Dr. King.' Dexter King, one of King's children, met with Ray in prison in 1997, saying afterwards that he believed Ray's claims of innocence. Dexter King died in 2024. With the support of King's family, a civil trial in state court was held in Memphis in 1999 against Loyd Jowers, a man alleged to have known about a conspiracy to assassinate King. Dozens of witnesses testified, and a Memphis jury found Jowers and unnamed others, including government agencies, participated in a conspiracy to assassinate King. What will the public see in the newly released documents? It's not clear what the records will actually show. King scholars, for example, would like to see what information the FBI was discussing and circulating as part of their investigation, said Ryan Jones, director of history, interpretation and curatorial services at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. 'That's critical given the fact the American public, at that time, was unaware that the FBI that is involved in the investigation, was leading a smear campaign to discredit the same man while he was alive,' Jones said. 'They were the same bureau who was receiving notices of assassination attempts against King and ignored them.' Academics who have studied King also would like to see information about the FBI's surveillance of King, including the extent they went to get details about his personal life, track him, and try to discredit him as anti-American, said Lerone A. Martin, director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University. However, Martin said he does not expect that the documents will have a 'smoking gun that will finally say, 'See, this is 100% evidence that the FBI was involved in this assassination.'' 'We have to view these documents with an eye of suspicion because of the extent the FBI was willing to go to, to try to discredit him,' Martin said. Why now? Trump's order about the records release said it is in the 'national interest' to release the records. 'Their families and the American people deserve transparency and truth,' the order said. However, the timing has led to skepticism from some observers. Jones questioned why the American public had not been able to see these documents much earlier. 'Why were they sealed on the basis of national security, if the assassin was in prison outside of Nashville?' he said. Jones said there are scholars who think the records release is a 'PR stunt' by a presidential administration that is 'rewriting, omitting the advances of some people that are tied to people of color, or diversity.' The Pentagon has faced questions from lawmakers and citizens over the removal of military heroes and historic mentions from Defense Department websites and social media pages after it purged online content that promoted women or minorities. In response, the department restored some of those posts. Martin said Trump's motivation could be part of an effort to shed doubt on government institutions. 'It could be an opportunity for the Trump administration to say, 'See, the FBI is evil, I've been trying to tell you this. This is why I've put (FBI director) Kash Patel in office because he's cleaning out the Deep State,'' Martin said. Another factor could be the two attempts on Trump's life as he was campaigning for a second presidential term, and a desire to 'expose the broader history of U.S. assassinations,' said Brian Kwoba, an associate history professor at the University of Memphis. 'That said, it is still a little bit confusing because it's not clear why any U.S. president, including Trump, would want to open up files that could be damaging to the United States and its image both in the U.S. and abroad,' he said.
Reuters
19 hours ago
- Politics
- Reuters
Trump releases Martin Luther King assassination files
WASHINGTON, July 21 (Reuters) - The U.S. Justice Department on Monday released more than 240,000 pages of documents related to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., including records from the FBI, which had surveilled the civil rights leader as part of an effort to discredit the Nobel Peace Prize winner and his civil rights movement. Files were posted, opens new tab on the website of the National Archives, which said more would be released. King died of an assassin's bullet in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968, as he increasingly extended his attention from a nonviolent campaign for equal rights for African Americans to economic issues and calls for peace. His death shook the United States in a year that would also bring race riots, anti-Vietnam war demonstrations and the assassination of presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy. Earlier this year, President Donald Trump's administration released thousands of pages of digital documents related to the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and former President John F. Kennedy, who was killed in 1963. Trump promised on the campaign trail to provide more transparency about Kennedy's death. Upon taking office, he also ordered aides to present a plan for the release of records relating to the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and King. The FBI kept files on King in the 1950s and 1960s - even wiretapping his phones - because of what the bureau falsely said at the time were his suspected ties to communism during the Cold War between the U.S. and Soviet Union. In recent years, the FBI has acknowledged that as an example of "abuse and overreach" in its history. The civil rights leader's family asked those who engage with the files to "do so with empathy, restraint, and respect for our family's continuing grief," and condemned "any attempts to misuse these documents." "Now more than ever, we must honor his sacrifice by committing ourselves to the realization of his dream – a society rooted in compassion, unity, and equality," they said in a statement. "During our father's lifetime, he was relentlessly targeted by an invasive, predatory, and deeply disturbing disinformation and surveillance campaign orchestrated by J. Edgar Hoover through the Federal Bureau of Investigation," the family, including his two living children, Martin III, 67, and Bernice, 62, said, referring to the then-FBI director. James Earl Ray, a segregationist and drifter, confessed to killing King but later recanted. He died in prison in 1998. King's family said it had filed a wrongful death civil lawsuit in Tennessee in 1999 that led to a jury unanimously concluding "that our father was the victim of a conspiracy involving Loyd Jowers and unnamed co-conspirators, including government agencies as a part of a wider scheme. The verdict also affirmed that someone other than James Earl Ray was the shooter, and that Mr. Ray was set up to take the blame. Our family views that verdict as an affirmation of our long-held beliefs." Jowers, once a Memphis police officer, told ABC's Prime Time Live in 1993 that he participated in a plot to kill King. A 2023 Justice Department report, opens new tab called his claims dubious.
Malay Mail
4 days ago
- Health
- Malay Mail
US withdraws from WHO pandemic response plan, claims sovereignty concerns
WASHINGTON, July 19 — President Donald Trump's administration said Friday the United States was rejecting changes agreed last year for the World Health Organization on its pandemic response, saying they violated the country's sovereignty. Trump on returning to office on January 20 immediately began his nation's withdrawal from the UN body, but the State Department said the language from last year would still have been binding on the United States. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who is a longtime critic of vaccines, said the changes 'risk unwarranted interference with our national sovereign right to make health policy.' 'We will put Americans first in all our actions and we will not tolerate international policies that infringe on Americans' speech, privacy or personal liberties,' they said in a joint statement. Rubio and Kennedy disassociated the United States from a series of amendments to the International Health Regulations, which provide a legal framework for combatting diseases, agreed last year at the World Health Assembly in Geneva. 'We regret the US decision to reject the amendments,' WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement posted on X. He stressed the amendments 'are clear about member states sovereignty,' adding that the WHO cannot mandate lockdowns or similar measures. The changes included a stated 'commitment to solidarity and equity' in which a new group would study the needs of developing countries in future emergencies. Countries have until Saturday to lodge reservations about the amendments. Conservative activists and vaccine sceptics in Britain and Australia, which both have left-leaning governments, have waged public campaigns against the changes. The amendments came about when the Assembly failed at a more ambitious goal of sealing a new global agreement on pandemics. Most of the world finally secured a treaty this May, but the United States did not participate as it was in the process of withdrawing from the WHO. The United States, then under president Joe Biden, took part in the May-June 2024 negotiations, but said it could not support consensus as it demanded protections for US intellectual property rights on vaccine development. Rubio's predecessor Antony Blinken had welcomed the amendments as progress. In their rejection of the amendments, Rubio and Kennedy said the changes 'fail to adequately address the WHO's susceptibility to the political influence and censorship – most notably from China – during outbreaks.' WHO's Ghebreyesus said the body is 'impartial and works with all countries to improve people's health.' — AFP
RTHK
4 days ago
- Health
- RTHK
Trump pulls US from World Health pandemic reforms
Trump pulls US from World Health pandemic reforms US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy is a long-time critic of vaccines. Photo: Reuters US President Donald Trump's administration said on Friday the United States was rejecting changes agreed last year for the World Health Organization on its pandemic response, saying they violated US sovereignty. Trump, on returning to office on January 20, immediately began the withdrawal of the United States from the UN body, but the State Department said the language from last year would still have been binding on the United States. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy, who is a longtime critic of vaccines, said that the changes "risk unwarranted interference with our national sovereign right to make health policy." "We will put Americans first in all our actions, and we will not tolerate international policies that infringe on Americans' speech, privacy or personal liberties," they said in a joint statement. Rubio and Kennedy disassociated the United States from a series of amendments to the International Health Regulations, which provide a legal framework for combating diseases, agreed last year at the World Health Assembly in Geneva. The amendments included a stated "commitment to solidarity and equity" in which a new group would study the needs of developing countries in future emergencies. Countries have until Saturday to lodge reservations about the amendments. Conservative activists and vaccine sceptics in Britain and Australia, which both have left-leaning governments, have waged public campaigns against the changes. The amendments came about when the Assembly failed at a more ambitious goal of sealing a new global agreement on pandemics. Most of the world finally sealed a treaty this May, but the United States did not participate as it was in the process of withdrawing from the World Health Organization. The United States, then under President Joe Biden, took part in the May-June 2024 negotiations, but said it could not support consensus as it demanded protections for US intellectual property rights on vaccine development. Rubio's predecessor, Antony Blinken, had welcomed the amendments as progress. (AFP)
