Donald Trump Releases 19,000 Previously Classified JFK Files

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President Donald Trump has released more than 19,000 files on the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy. 

The final release in accordance with US President Donald Trump’s October 2017 directive to make public a bulk of the final files.

On October 21, 2017, Trump Tweeted that he'd allow the "long blocked and classified JFK FILES to be opened."

Conspiracy theorists had thousands of files to research in the following months after the release.

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So far, Ted Cruz's father, Rafael Cruz, hasn't been implicated in the JFK release despite Trump suggesting he had played a role in the plot.

SputnikNews reports: The October directive gave agencies seeking to appeal any releases until Tuesday to make their case.

The administration announced Thursday that some 520 files will be be held until 2021 over national security concerns raised by the FBI, CIA and others, but the other 19,045 were released Thursday.

"I agree with the archivist's recommendation that the continued withholdings are necessary to protect against identifiable harm to national security, law enforcement or foreign affairs that is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in immediate disclosure," Trump wrote Thursday.

In this Nov. 23, 1963 file photo, Lee Harvey Oswald is led down a corridor of the Dallas police station for another round of questioning in connection with the assassination of US, President John F. Kennedy.

Oswald, who denied any involvement in the shooting, was formally charged with

Documents released in 2017 reveal Lee Harvey Oswald was on a watch list of people whose mail was to be intercepted by federal agents before he killed Kennedy, but many of the releases have been irrelevant to the assassination.

It was also revealed that US President Lyndon B Johnson, Kennedy's Vice President, believed he was assassinated in retaliation for his order to kill South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, who was executed earlier that same month in Saigon in a CIA-backed coup, which has only further fueled theories that Oswald was acting on behalf of a foreign government.

Other revelations stemming from Trump's October directive seem to contradict that theory, like the secret testimony to the House Select Committee on Assassinations from the former CIA station chief in Mexico City, David Atlee Phillips.

He characterized Oswald as a "loony" and attested that he believed he acted alone.

"God knows I would like for it to come out that Fidel Castro was responsible or that the Soviets were responsible," Phillips told the committee, adding, "but I know of no evidence to show that the Cubans or the Soviets put him up to it."

"The American public doesn't want to believe that one man could murder Camelot," Phillips said, referring to the romantic nickname for Kennedy's all-star administration.

One thing is certain: theories will continue to fly until the release of the remaining 520 documents, as it is inferred they are the most sensitive. Even then, America may never stop debating one of its most troubling mysteries.