Around 10,000 pages of documents tied to the 1968 assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy were released Friday, as part of an ongoing declassification effort ordered by President Donald Trump.
The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration posted roughly 229 files containing the pages to its public website. Many files related to the senator's assassination had been previously released, but others had not been digitized and sat for decades in storage facilities maintained by the federal government.
"Nearly 60 years after the tragic assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, the American people will, for the first time, have the opportunity to review the federal government's investigation thanks to the leadership of President Trump," Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, said in a statement.
Gabbard also said the files' release "shines a long-overdue light on the truth."
The release of the RFK files comes a month after unredacted files related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy were disclosed.
Trump, a Republican, has championed in the name of transparency the release of documents related to high-profile assassinations and investigations. But he's also been deeply suspicious for years of the government's intelligence agencies, and his administration's release of once-hidden files opens the door for additional public scrutiny and questioning about the conclusions and operations of institutions such as the CIA and the FBI.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a son of the Democratic New York senator who now serves as the U.S. Health and Human Services secretary, commended Trump and Gabbard for their "courage" and "dogged efforts" to release the files.
"Lifting the veil on the RFK papers is a necessary step toward restoring trust in American government," the health secretary said in a statement.
