The JFK files: Here's what's happened since their original planned release

The executive order came after Trump had previously promised on the campaign trail to declassify the documents upon entering his second term, saying at the time, "When I return to the White House, I will declassify and unseal all JFK assassination-related documents. It's been 60 years, time for the American people to know the TRUTH!"

However, this is not the first time the JFK files have been expected to be released. 

"I have no choice," Trump said in a memo, where he cited "potentially irreversible harm" to national security if he allowed the records to be released. Trump said at the time the potential harm to U.S. national security, law enforcement or foreign affairs is "of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in immediate disclosure."

"I have now determined that the continued redaction and withholding of information from records pertaining to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy is not consistent with the public interest and the release of these records is long overdue," Trump's Thursday order states. 

"And although no Act of Congress directs the release of information pertaining to the assassinations of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I have determined that the release of all records in the Federal Government's possession pertaining to each of those assassinations is also in the public interest."

"The 60-year strategy of lies and secrecy, disinformation, censorship, and defamation employed by Intel officials to obscure and suppress troubling facts about JFK's assassination has provided the playbook for a series of subsequent crises - the MLK and RFK assassinations, Vietnam, 9/11, the Iraq war and COVID - that have each accelerated the subversion of our exemplary democracy by the Military/Medical Industrial Complex and pushed us further down the road toward totalitarianism," Kennedy Jr. posted on X. 

JFK's grandson, Jack Schlossberg, also reacted to the declassification news, writing on X that the move was "using JFK as a political prop, when he's not here to punch back."

"There's nothing heroic about it," Schlossberg wrote. 

Fox News Digital's Louis Casiano, Landon Mion and The Associated Press contributed to this report.