Gabbard’s Team Seizes Classified CIA Kennedy Files After Trump Declassification Order

In a dramatic escalation of President Donald Trump's declassification push, a team of officials dispatched by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard arrived unannounced at a secret CIA archival facility in the Washington area one morning in early April, seizing still-classified files related to the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr., according to three people familiar with the matter.

The operation, described by Gabbard as involving "hunters" scouring agency archives, caught CIA security personnel off-guard, prompting an immediate call to officials already engaged in declassification efforts. Acting under the authority of Trump's January executive order, which mandated a 45-day review for documents on the RFK and MLK assassinations—with a March deadline already passed—the team aimed to transfer the sensitive materials from CIA custody to the National Archives for processing. This move highlighted growing frustrations within Gabbard's Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) over the perceived slow pace of progress by the spy agency, despite the order's intent to restore public trust in the intelligence community.

Gabbard first publicly detailed the aggressive archival hunt during an April 10 Cabinet meeting, informing Trump that her team was "actively going out and trying to search out the truth" across CIA and FBI repositories. The president praised the initiative, as did Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has long alleged CIA involvement in the killings of his father and uncle. The 1963 JFK assassination in Dallas, officially attributed to lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswald, has fueled decades of conspiracy theories, with polls indicating widespread American skepticism about the full story; similar doubts persist around RFK's 1968 shooting in Los Angeles by Sirhan Sirhan and MLK's 1968 Memphis slaying, despite official conclusions.

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While the unheralded warehouse raid underscored underlying tensions between ODNI and the CIA over control of historical records, both agencies issued a joint statement affirming their collaborative commitment to Trump's transparency mandate. Interactions during the April encounter were described as professional by Gabbard's office and two other sources, reflecting a mutual acknowledgment that—after more than 60 years—it was overdue to advance declassification. Recent releases, including around 80,000 JFK files in March and 70,000 RFK documents in April and May, have offered new details on CIA knowledge of Oswald but have yet to overturn established narratives, leaving room for ongoing scrutiny as the process continues.

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