Trump administration releases 240,000 pages of FBI records on Martin Luther King Jr. assassination
Separately Monday, Attorney General Pam Bondi's social media account featured a picture of the attorney general with Alveda King in her office.
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Besides fulfilling Trump's executive order, the latest release serves as another alternative headline for the president as he tries to mollify supporters angry over his administration's handling of records concerning the sex trafficking investigation of Jeffrey Epstein, who killed himself behind bars while awaiting trial in 2019, during Trump's first presidency. Trump last Friday ordered the Justice Department to release grand jury testimony but stopped short of unsealing the entire case file.
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Bernice King and Martin Luther King III did not mention Trump in their statement Monday.
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Some civil rights activists were not so sparing.
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'Trump releasing the MLK assassination files is not about transparency or justice,' said the Rev. Al Sharpton. 'It's a desperate attempt to distract people from the firestorm engulfing Trump over the Epstein files and the public unraveling of his credibility among the MAGA base.'
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The King records were initially intended to be sealed until 2027, until Justice Department attorneys asked a federal judge to lift the sealing order ahead of its expiration date.
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Scholars, history buffs and journalists have been preparing to study the documents to find new information about his assassination on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee.
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The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which King co-founded in 1957 as the Civil Rights Movement blossomed, opposed the release. They, along with King's family, argued that the FBI illegally surveilled King and other civil rights figures, tapping their offices and phone lines with the aim of discrediting them and their movement.
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It has long been established that then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was intensely interested if not obsessed with King and others that he considered radicals. FBI records released previously show how Hoover's bureau wiretapped King's telephone lines, bugged his hotel rooms and used informants to get information against him.
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'He was relentlessly targeted by an invasive, predatory, and deeply disturbing disinformation and surveillance campaign orchestrated by J. Edgar Hoover through the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI),' the King children said in their statement.
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'The intent of the government's COINTELPRO campaign was not only to monitor, but to discredit, dismantle and destroy Dr. King's reputation and the broader American Civil Rights Movement,' they continued. 'These actions were not only invasions of privacy, but intentional assaults on the truth — undermining the dignity and freedoms of private citizens who fought for justice, designed to neutralize those who dared to challenge the status quo.'
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The Kings said they 'support transparency and historical accountability' but 'object to any attacks on our father's legacy or attempts to weaponize it to spread falsehoods.'
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Opposition to King intensified even after the Civil Rights Movement compelled Congress and President Lyndon B. Johnson to enact the Civil Right Act of 1964 and the Voting Right Act of 1965. After those landmark victories, King turned much of his attention to economic justice and international peace. He was an outspoken critic of rapacious capitalism and the Vietnam War. King argued that political rights alone were not enough in an uneven economy. Many establishment figures like Hoover viewed King as a communist threat.
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