by By April Ryan, Bureau Chief, Black Press USA, Washington, DC
President Donald Trump has authorized the release of over 240,000 pages of FBI documents pertaining to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1968 assassination, much to the chagrin of his children and other civil rights leaders.
Giving Americans the truth is the main goal here, stated Harrison Fields, Trump’s deputy press secretary.
The data pertaining to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert Kennedy, and Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were declassified when President Trump issued Executive Order 14176 in late January of this year.
Since 1977, the King FBI files have been sealed. Then, President Trump’s executive order from January is opposed by Martin Luther King III and Bernice King, Dr. King’s two surviving offspring. The King children argue that the files should remain sealed because of the intimate nature of their father’s 1968 murder.
“We need to be crystal clear on the fact that Trump’s release of the MLK assassination files is not about transparency or justice, but rather a desperate attempt to divert people’s attention from the firestorm engulfing Trump over the Epstein files and the public unraveling of his credibility among the MAGA base,” said Reverend Al Sharpton, the head of the National Action Network and a close friend of the King family.
Fields referred this news outlet to the Department of Justice when Black Press USA contacted him for his thoughts on the timing of the Epstein files’ release.
Before the files were made public, the King family asked to see them. Since the FBI files were examined, the family has argued that the federal government’s investigation of their father violated their privacy. The government’s COINTELPRO campaign aimed to not only monitor Dr. King’s reputation but also to undermine, discredit, and destroy the American Civil Rights Movement as a whole.
“Our mother, Coretta Scott King, prepared us for these repeated attempts by saying, They keep trying to assassinate your father over and over again,” Bernice King writes in her article for Vanity Fair.
