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Oliver Stone says President Donald Trump “deserves praise” for his decision to release the last of the remaining top secret government files related to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, but also had some caveats.
The Oscar winning director — whose 1991 film JFK is easily the best-known and most popular film ever made on the subject of Kennedy’s 1963 murder — released a statement late Friday concerning Trump’s move to order the release of the final 3 percent of the roughly 5 million investigative files related to the topic that have been held by the National Archives and Records Administration. Trump has also ordered the release of the remaining files on the subject of the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
“President Trump deserves praise for yesterday’s executive order declassifying the still closed records in government files on the assassination of John Kennedy, an event which occurred 61 years ago,” wrote Stone in a statement given to The Hollywood Reporter. “Those files should have been released in October of 2017. President Trump deserves further credit for going beyond that, and ordering the release of still classified files on the Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy assassinations.”
Continued Stone: “No one expects there to be a smoking gun ‘he did it’ document in those files. But from what previous writers understand, there will be information that will contribute to a more informed mosaic of what happened in those cases.”
Stone added: “Congressmen Steve Cohen, David Schweikert and Tim Burchett have been urging this action. They have suggested an oversight board, something like the former [JFK Assassination Records Review Board], to verify that all records have been properly released in unredacted form. If those records reveal a trail to other papers, that avenue should be investigated by that board.”
On Thursday, fulfilling a campaign promise, Trump ordered the director of national intelligence and attorney general to spend the next 15 days coming up with a plan to release the remaining JFK files. A plan to release the RFK and MLK files within the next 45 days. Under the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, the government was previously required to release all documents related to the assassination in 2017, but Trump has said that he was convinced to block some of the remaining files.
Kennedy was shot in killed in Dallas, Texas, on Nov. 22, 1963. A subsequent investigation determined that a former Marine and communist sympathizer, Lee Harvey Oswald, acted alone in shooting Kennedy with a rifle — a conclusion that has been the source of much criticism and speculation in the decades since.
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