The U.S. Justice Department on Monday released more than 240,000 pages of documents related to the 1968 assassination of civil-rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. The trove, posted online by the National Archives, fulfills an executive order President Donald Trump signed in January directing agencies to declassify remaining records tied to the killings of King and the Kennedy brothers. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said the disclosure includes decades-old FBI surveillance files, previously unseen CIA material on the international hunt for convicted gunman James Earl Ray, internal memoranda and investigative leads gathered after King was shot in Memphis. The documents had been sealed by court order since 1977 and were not due for public release until 2027. King’s children, Martin Luther King III and Bernice King, welcomed transparency but urged the public to read the files "with empathy, restraint and respect" and repeated the family’s view that Ray was not solely responsible for the assassination. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference also opposed the timing of the release, while King’s niece Alveda King and Attorney General Pam Bondi praised the move as an unprecedented step toward historical accountability. Civil-rights figure Rev. Al Sharpton called the publication a diversion from separate pressure on the administration to unseal records tied to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. Historians and researchers are expected to comb the newly available material for insights into the FBI’s COINTELPRO surveillance of King and the broader context of late-1960s political violence in the United States.