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Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said Thursday she has a large team working overtime to archive government documents related to the 1968 assassinations of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. ahead of their release to the public.
“I’ve had over 100 people working around the clock to scan the paper,” Gabbard told President Trump during a Cabinet meeting at the White House. “These have been sitting in boxes in storage for decades — they have never been scanned or seen before.”
“We’ll have those ready to release here within the next few days,” she added.
Kennedy, who was the brother of assassinated President John F. Kennedy and also served as his attorney general, was running for the Democratic presidential nomination when he was shot after a campaign event in California.
King, who was one of the most prominent leaders of the Civil Rights Movement at the time of his death, was shot at a hotel in Memphis, Tenn.
Their assassins were convicted in both murders, but conspiracy theories have continued to thrive about the circumstances of their deaths decades later.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the son of the late senator, was in the Cabinet meeting when Gabbard provided the update on the status of the document review.
He said it was “very gratifying” to hear the news, as Trump acknowledged his presence at the meeting.
Upon taking office in January, Trump signed an executive order directing his administration to release troves of previously undisclosed records related to the assassinations, as well as other high-profile cases that the government has overseen, including documents related to President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 and records about disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who died by suicide in 2019 while in federal custody awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
The National Archives released more than 2,000 pages of documents last month on President Kennedy’s assassination, though experts said many of the pages were already public.