The country has been calling on President Donald Trump to release the Epstein Files, but, in another sleight of hand maneuver, the Trump administration decided to release instead records of the FBI’s surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr.
Something the King family did not want.
More than 240,000 pages of records related to the 1968 assassination of Dr. King Jr. have been unsealed and were posted to the National Archives’ website on Monday (July 21).
The administration lauded the unwanted release as a testament to its newfound transparency. Still, many are receiving the update as a poor attempt to distract the public from the real issue.
In a statement issued Monday, Martin Luther King Jr.’s surviving children — Martin Luther King III, 67, and Bernice King, 62 — acknowledged that their father’s assassination has long been a subject of intense public interest. However, they stressed that this remains a deeply personal matter and urged that any related documents be understood within their full historical context.
“As the children of Dr. King and Mrs. Coretta Scott King, his tragic death has been an intensely personal grief — a devastating loss for his wife, children, and the granddaughter he never met — an absence our family has endured for over 57 years,” they wrote. “We ask those who engage with the release of these files to do so with empathy, restraint, and respect for our family’s continuing grief.”
The Kings received early access to the records and assembled their own teams to review them. Their efforts continued even after the government made the documents publicly available. Among the materials are FBI leads following King’s assassination and evidence of the CIA’s intense interest in his shift toward international anti-war and anti-poverty advocacy in the years leading up to his death.
It remains unclear what questions the unsealing of the documents actually answers.
For weeks, Trump has faced backlash from MAGA supporters about the handling of files related to Jeffrey Epstein. On the 2024 election campaign trail, Trump vowed to unseal Epstein’s alleged client list. His allies, who now make up the majority of his administration, echoed his sentiments.
“It should have come out a long time ago,” Attorney General Pam Bondi told Fox News host Sean Hannity in January 2024. “If people in that report are still fighting to keep their names private, Sean, they have no legal basis to do so unless they’re a child, a victim or a cooperating defendant.”
However, after his former DOGE leader, Elon Musk, shared on his X platform that Trump is in the Epstein files, Trump’s camp immediately backtracked.
Earlier this month, the Justice Department published a memo announcing that it would not release any additional documents related to the high-profile case. They took it a step further, claiming that there was no “client list” before Trump declared that there was a list and that the Democrats had created it as a way to destroy his political ambitions.
Some of Trump’s staunchest supporters then turned on him, including libertarian-leaning podcaster Joe Rogan, American stand-up comic Theo Von, right-leaning political commentator Candace Owens, far-right political pundit Nick Fuentes and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
The release of the MLK files has done little to satisfy Trump’s MAGA base, but Trump no doubt already has his next distraction lined up to try to throw them all off kilter.
