Earlier this year, President Trump signed an executive order to unseal documents related to the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. before their original court-appointed release date. Amidst pushback from the King family, a federal judge has stated he’s open to granting the Trump administration’s request.

According to the New York Times, a hearing was held on June 4 as a result of a lawsuit filed by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to prevent the early release of the documents. Judge Richard Leon of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia said the first step he’ll take before making a decision is to have the National Archives present an inventory of all the sealed documents related to MLK. The judge added that this inventory will only be accessible to him as he intends to prioritize privacy throughout this process. 

“This is delicate stuff,” Leon said during the hearing.

In 1977, a judge ordered that the documents in question, as well as the tapes and transcripts the FBI gathered through wiretap surveillance of Dr. King, be sealed from the public record until 2027. The purpose of Leon’s inventory would be to find if the FBI had properly sorted documents related to its investigation of the 1968 assassination of MLK from the transcripts related to their prolonged surveillance campaign. 

Leon stressed that this process would take time and could require several years of effort. “It’s not going to happen overnight,” the judge said. “The court is going to move very carefully.” 

Johnny Walker, an attorney for the Department of Justice (DOJ), requested that Judge Leon authorize DOJ agents to review the documents in order to gather a subset to submit to the King family for approval. Leon stated that if the SCLC and DOJ could agree to review the documents together and come to a mutual decision, he would be inclined to move quicker in making the decision to unseal them. 

Both the SCLC, the organization MLK led and co-founded, and King’s family have pushed back against unsealing the documents early. The FBI was actively antagonistic towards MLK under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover. The agency persistently surveilled him and his family through the COINTELPRO program. The SCLC and King family have significant concerns that unsealing the documents early is an effort to “discredit” MLK’s legacy and the civil rights movement as a whole. 

From CBS NEWS: 

The SCLC and the King family, who said the FBI “illegally surveilled” King and his SCLC colleagues at “SCLC’s offices, in places of public accommodation, and at Dr. King’s home,” from 1963 until Dr. King’s assassination, want those wiretap recordings and transcripts to remain sealed though at least the end of the 1977 court order.

The SCLC and the King family wrote that the Trump administration’s attempt to unseal the files is “without legal justification,” adding that Mr. Trump “lacks the authority to compel the disclosure of any assassination records that are under a court-ordered seal, and the sealed files—which are the result of illegal incursions on SCLC’s privacy interests—are much more expansive in scope than those pertaining to Dr. King’s assassination.”

In addition to the suit filed by the SCLC, King’s children, Bernice King and Martin Luther King III, filed written declarations opposing the release. 

“We respectfully disagree that the public release of the sealed records is a benefit for our family,” King III wrote. “The FBI’s purpose in creating the documents the government seeks to unseal was to misinform the public and irreparably damage our father’s reputation and, most importantly, destroy the civil rights movement. Such an effort against a private citizen is unprecedented.”

The family’s concerns have only intensified given the relative carelessness with which the Trump administration handled the release of the documents related to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy. In some of the released documents, sensitive information, such as hundreds of Social Security numbers, was revealed. 

While the DOJ has said it would steer clear of releasing any of the FBI surveillance records regarding MLK, the Trump administration’s track record makes it hard to take that statement in good faith. 

If there was that little attention paid to documents regarding the father of one of the Trump administration’s cabinet members, I can only imagine what they would release about one of our greatest civil rights icons in the name of “transparency.” 

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