Expect Smear Campaign When Trump Exposes MLK Files

By Lauren Burke

On January 23, three days into his second term, President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14176, called the Declassification of Records Concerning the Assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Since then, only the records of November 22, 1963, the assassination of John F. Kennedy has been made public.

There had been year-long debates about whether the records should be released. The Kennedy records were deemed underwhelming by many who examined them, some of whom were joined to a six decades-long conspiracy theory that Lee Harvey Oswald was not the lone murderer of President Kennedy. But the long-classified documents on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., may spark a different set of issues.

The civil rights icon’s personal life is likely to be reviewed when the documents are released. The files, compiled between the late 1950s and Dr. King’s assassination in 1968, are believed to include extensive surveillance records, wiretaps, and psychological profiles created during the height of the FBI and CIA’s covert monitoring of domestic activists as part of their COINTELPRO domestic surveillance program.

Even though the January 2025 executive order in part reads that “the federal government has not released to the public all of its records related to those events. Their families and the American people deserve transparency and truth,” some believe that all the release of documents will do damage to the public reputation of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Even though Trump announced that transparency was the reason for the executive order, the King Family assured on January 24, the day after the executive order was signed, that the real goal was character assassination.

“The assassination of our father is a deeply personal family loss that we have endured over the last 56 years. We hope to be provided the opportunity to review the files as a family prior to its public release,” the family said in an Instagram post on Jan. 24, the day after Trump’s order. They know the right wing wants to smear Dr. King, and one way to do it is by putting these smears in public under the guise of transparency. If there are assassination records, release those. But smears are not assassination records,” a message on Instagram read.

Reports suggest the file may include allegations of infidelity, associations with individuals once suspected of Communist ties, and efforts by intelligence agencies to destabilize King’s influence through covert means. Scholars warn that without context, such revelations could be easily misinterpreted or manipulated.

Virgie Hoban, a historian at Georgetown University, explained in 2021 that, “the intelligence community of the 1960s was deeply invested in discrediting King. These files may say more about Hoover’s FBI than about King himself.”

Teressa Raiford, a civil rights activist, has pointed out that the FBI, “understood that the civil rights movement was winning people’s hearts and minds through the circulation of photographs and videos of nonviolent, peaceful protests,” and that the reason that King’s image is so vital to the overall movement means that safeguarding it is vital.