King Jr’s two living children, Martin III and Bernice, who were notified ahead of time about the release, said in a statement on Monday: “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.<\/p>\n
“The release of these files must be viewed within their full historical context.<\/p>\n
“During our father’s lifetime, 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).” <\/p>\n
The statement said the government’s surveillance had denied King the “dignity and freedoms of private citizens”. <\/p>\n
On the campaign trail, Trump promised Americans he would release files on the assassinations of King and former President John F Kennedy. <\/p>\n
He signed an executive order in January ordering that documents from both assassinations be declassified, along with the records in the assassination of Robert F Kennedy.<\/p>\n
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) said in a press release on Monday: “The MLK files in today’s release had never been digitized and sat collecting dust in facilities across the federal government for decades, until today.” <\/p>\n
The documents include “internal FBI memos” and “never-before-seen CIA records” behind the hunt for King’s assassin, the DNI said. <\/p>\n
The release was co-ordinated with the FBI, Department of Justice, National Archives and CIA. <\/p>\n
“The American people deserve answers decades after the horrific assassination of one of our nation’s great leaders,” US Attorney General Pamela Bondi said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"King Jr’s two living children, Martin III and Bernice, who were notified ahead of time about the release,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":281205,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[12,26],"class_list":{"0":"post-281204","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world","8":"tag-news","9":"tag-world"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114894094009121372","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=281204"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281204\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/281205"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=281204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=281204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=281204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}