Overview

• The National Archives published more than 240,000 pages of FBI surveillance records on July 21 under President Trump’s declassification order for assassination files.
• Martin Luther King Jr.’s children and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference urged empathy and restraint in handling the material, citing their ongoing grief and concerns about legacy distortion.
• Released documents reveal COINTELPRO-era tactics by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, including wiretapping King’s communications, bugging his hotel rooms and recruiting informants to undermine him.
• Historians say the files add little new to the known account of King’s 1968 assassination and note that key wiretap recordings will remain sealed until at least 2027.
• Civil rights activists such as Reverend Al Sharpton have criticized the timing as a political diversion from controversies over Jeffrey Epstein records.