by Lauren Burke

“This is delicate stuff,” Judge Richard Leon said during a hearing on June 4 on the question of whether classified documents related to Dr. Martin Luther King will be made public. “We’re going to go slowly. Little steps.” Judge Leon also said the process of potentially making the King records public would be a “long journey” that would likely involve consulting the King family. The judge also said he would request that the National Archives compile an inventory of the King’s records that he would later review. Judge Leon is a George W. Bush appointee. Lawyers for Trump’s Department of Justice are asking Judge Leon to end a “sealing order” on records related to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. so that they would be released two years earlier than the sealing order’s expiration date. An attorney for DoJ asserted the Trump administration only wants records related to the King assassination. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a civil rights group founded by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, and his family, is opposed to the early release of documents from 1963 to 1968.

On January 23, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14176, titled ‘Declassification of Records Concerning the Assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’ The executive order was an attempt to direct the declassification of documents related to the assassinations of the three historic figures. Documents related to the assassination of John F. Kennedy were eventually made public. Many found the files underwhelming. The JFK assassination records were released to the public in two separate information drops on March 18, 2025. The files were made public by The National Archives and the release of 2,182 records and 63,400 pages of materials are now in the public domain. More records are expected to be released as they are digitized.