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    Judge Considers Early Release of Martin Luther King Jr. Assassination Documents

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    The materials are scheduled to be unsealed in 2027, but President Trump signed an executive order in January aimed at moving up the date.A federal judge in Washington said on Wednesday that he was open to lifting a court order ahead of schedule to release potentially sensitive documents related to the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., nodding to an executive order President Trump signed in January aimed at achieving that outcome.During a hearing on Wednesday to discuss the possibility, Judge Richard Leon of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia nonetheless cautioned that he intended to proceed slowly and prioritize privacy in an extended process to determine whether any documents should be released before 2027, the date that another judge set in 1977 for the documents to be unsealed.Judge Leon said he would start by ordering the National Archives to show him — and him alone — an inventory of all the sealed materials related to Dr. King that have been stored there.He said that the inventory, which the government says it has not reviewed, might help shed light on whether documents specifically related to Dr. King’s assassination in 1968, and the investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation that followed, had been separated out and could be efficiently processed.The hearing on Wednesday came through a lawsuit brought by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the civil rights organization based in Atlanta associated with Dr. King, which has sued to halt any effort to unseal documents early.It came in response to an executive order Mr. Trump signed in January that directed intelligence agencies to set in motion plans to release records related to the assassinations of Dr. King, President John F. Kennedy and Senator Robert F. Kennedy.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Justice Dept. Drops Biden-Era Push to Obtain Peter Navarro’s Emails

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      The department’s move is one of many recent actions taken to dismiss criminal and civil actions against Trump allies such as Mr. Navarro, the president’s trade adviser.The Justice Department has abruptly dropped its effort to force Peter Navarro, President Trump’s trade adviser, to turn over hundreds of his emails dating to the first Trump administration to the National Archives, according to a court filing on Tuesday.The decision to drop the civil lawsuit was disclosed in a one-page notice filed in Federal District Court in the District of Columbia. The department offered no explanation for the move, but it is one of many recent actions it has taken to dismiss criminal and civil actions taken against Trump allies.Mr. Navarro, 75, had long resisted the government’s request that he give the archives emails from his personal ProtonMail account relating to his role as a White House adviser, as required by the Presidential Records Act.Defiance is Mr. Navarro’s default. He served about four months in the geriatric unit of a federal prison in Miami after refusing to comply with a subpoena to appear before a congressional committee investigating his false claims about the 2020 election.In 2022, the Biden Justice Department sued Mr. Navarro, one of the main architects of Mr. Trump’s second-term tariff policy, to retrieve the communications. The lawsuit charged him with “wrongfully retaining presidential records that are the property of the United States, and which constitute part of the permanent historical record of the prior administration.”The lawsuit accused Mr. Navarro of using his private email account to conduct public work, including an effort to influence the White House response to the pandemic. Those emails were needed to preserve the historical record, officials at the archives said.Mr. Navarro unsuccessfully petitioned the Supreme Court to dismiss the suit last year.A federal magistrate judge earlier reviewed about 900 messages, determining that more than 500 were not presidential records. He ordered additional hearings to decide how many of the remaining 350-plus emails needed to be turned over to the government.Mr. Navarro’s lawyer did not immediately return a request for comment.Stanley Woodward, who represented Mr. Navarro in both his civil and criminal cases, recused himself after Mr. Trump appointed him in April to serve as associate attorney general. More

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      National Archives Releases More Robert F. Kennedy Files

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      The new batch of documents included transcripts of police interviews with Sirhan Sirhan, who was convicted of killing Mr. Kennedy.The National Archives released on Wednesday a second tranche of documents related to the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York, though the documents are unlikely to change scholars’ views of his murder.The release of 60,000 additional documents was announced by Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence.“After the initial release of 10,000 documents three weeks ago, we searched F.B.I. and C.I.A. warehouses for any records not previously turned over to The National Archives,” Ms. Gabbard wrote on social media. “More than 60,000 documents were discovered, declassified, and digitized for public viewing. Today’s release is an important step toward maximum transparency, finding the truth, and sharing the truth.”Ms. Gabbard’s office said the new batch of documents included transcripts of police interviews with Sirhan Sirhan, who was convicted of killing Mr. Kennedy. Many of the documents had previously been released.Sirhan Sirhan, right, accused of assassinating Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, with his attorney Russell E. Parsons in Los Angeles, in June 1968.Associated PressThe first tranche of documents included letters from many members of the public advancing various conspiracy theories. Some were heartfelt condolences from world leaders. Others raised questions about the circumstances of the assassination.Some were concerned about the rights of Mr. Sirhan, others the circumstances of his background as a Palestinian. And one person had, with no evidence, a theory that Robert Kennedy actually died at Chappaquiddick.Ms. Gabbard’s office said the new documents included documents with “rumors circulating on foreign soil that Senator Kennedy had been shot one month prior to his true assassination date.”It will take scholars weeks, if not months, to go through the pages, but expectations are low that anything useful will be found.“We have always known who assassinated R.F.K., because he was shot in front of a lot of people,” Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst at the National Security Archive, an independent research center at George Washington University, said in an interview after the first tranche was released. “So this collection can’t be expected to change that history.”Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services and Senator Kennedy’s son, has pushed for the releases. Mr. Kennedy has pushed alternative theories and has said that he does not believe Mr. Sirhan killed his father.Mr. Sirhan pleaded guilty to killing the senator while he was campaigning for president, though he said he had no memory of shooting him. He said he wanted to kill Mr. Kennedy because of his support for Israel. More

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      Marco Rubio Adds a New Title Under Trump: Interim National Security Adviser

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      The former senator from Florida is now the head of four government bodies. He has outdone Henry Kissinger and even Xi Jinping, China’s leader, who has only three main titles.Secretary of state. Acting administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Acting archivist for the National Archives and Records Administration. And now interim national security adviser to President Trump.Like a Christmas tree bedecked with shiny ornaments of every shape and size, Marco Rubio, 53, has accumulated four titles starting with his confirmation as secretary of state on Jan. 20, the same day that Mr. Trump took his oath of office.It very well could be a record in the modern history of the U.S. government. And it adds to the immigrant success story that is core to the narrative of Mr. Rubio, a former senator from Florida whose father worked as a bartender and mother toiled as a housekeeper after they left Cuba for the United States.But the proliferation of titles raises questions about whether Mr. Rubio can play any substantial role in the administration if he is juggling all these positions, especially under a president who eschews the traditional workings of government and who has appointed a businessman friend, Steve Witkoff, as a special envoy handling the most sensitive diplomacy.Mr. Trump announced Mr. Rubio’s newest position in a social media post on Thursday afternoon, a surprise twist in the first big personnel shake-up of this administration. The president had just ousted Michael Waltz from the White House national security adviser job as well as Mr. Waltz’s deputy, Alex Wong. In the same post, Mr. Trump said Mr. Waltz would now be his nominee to be ambassador to the United Nations.Mr. Rubio’s appointment to yet another job — as if he were cloned in a B-grade sci-fi movie — was so sudden that Tammy Bruce, the State Department spokeswoman, learned about it when a reporter read Mr. Trump’s social media post to her during a regular televised news conference.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Inside the 24-Hour Scramble Among Top National Security Officials Over the J.F.K. Documents

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      President Trump’s national security team was stunned and forced to scramble after he announced on Monday that he would release 80,000 pages of documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy with only 24 hours’ notice.Administration officials had been working on releasing the records since January, when Mr. Trump signed an executive order mandating it. But that process was still underway on Monday afternoon when Mr. Trump, during a visit to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, said the files would be made available the next day.By the time the files were made public on Tuesday evening, some of the country’s top national security officials had spent hours trying to assess any possible security hazards under extreme deadline pressure.John Ratcliffe, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, had been emphasizing to senior administration officials that some documents had nothing to do with Mr. Kennedy and were developed decades after the assassination, according to four people with knowledge of the discussions. He wanted to make sure that other officials were fully aware of what the files contained and would not be caught off guard, but he was clear that he would not seek to impede any files from being released, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations.Soon after Mr. Trump spoke on Monday afternoon, officials at the National Security Council quickly convened a call to map out a plan to take stock of which documents still needed to be unredacted. The release had to be coordinated with the National Archives and Records Administration. Some officials raised concerns about unintended consequences of rushing the release of the files, including the disclosure of sensitive personal information like the Social Security numbers of people who were still alive, the people said.Officials involved in the process of declassification said the number of files had expanded greatly over many decades because, with each investigation into Kennedy-related material, information that had nothing to do with the assassinated president has come under that umbrella. In some cases, that includes documents created decades after his death, according to one person with knowledge of the process.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Constitutional Convention? Some Democrats Fear It’s Coming.

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      Some Republicans have said that a constitutional convention is overdue. Many Democratic-led states have rescinded their long-ago calls for one, and California will soon consider whether to do the same.As Republicans prepare to take control of Congress and the White House, among the many scenarios keeping Democrats up at night is an event that many Americans consider a historical relic: a constitutional convention.The 1787 gathering in Philadelphia to write the Constitution was the one and only time state representatives have convened to work on the document.But a simple line in the Constitution allows Congress to convene a rewrite session if two-thirds of state legislatures have called for one. The option has never been used, but most states have long-forgotten requests on the books that could be enough to trigger a new constitutional convention, some scholars and politicians believe.Some Democratic officials are more concerned than ever. In California, a Democratic state senator, Scott Wiener, will introduce legislation on Monday that would rescind the state’s seven active calls for a constitutional convention, the first such move since Donald J. Trump’s election to a second term.Mr. Wiener, who represents San Francisco, and other liberal Democrats believe there is a strong possibility of a “runaway convention.” They say that Republicans could call a convention on the premise, say, of producing an amendment requiring that the federal budget be balanced, then open the door for a free-for-all in which a multitude of other amendments are considered, including some that could restrict abortion access or civil rights.“I do not want California to inadvertently trigger a constitutional convention that ends up shredding the Constitution,” Mr. Wiener said in an interview.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Special Counsel in Biden Documents Case Is Expected to Release Report Soon

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      Most of the work by Robert K. Hur appears to have wrapped up after President Biden sat down with investigators in October, according to people in Mr. Biden’s orbit.Robert K. Hur, the special counsel investigating President Biden’s mishandling of documents retained from his vice presidency, is expected to release his report soon, according to people with knowledge of the situation.The imminent release of the report suggests that Mr. Hur is nearing the end of an investigation that began just over a year ago.It is expected to criticize Mr. Biden and his aides for sloppy record-keeping and storage, according to people in Mr. Biden’s orbit, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter. But those people have long believed he will not be charged with any crime, judging from the lines of inquiry prosecutors have pursued in their interviews with witnesses and the president’s cooperation with investigators.Most of Mr. Hur’s work was completed in the final days of 2023, and appears to have wrapped up after Mr. Biden sat down with investigators in October, those people said. He also conducted interviews with several longtime advisers in the Biden administration, including the former chief of staff Ron Klain, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, and Steve Ricchetti, his counselor.Former President Donald J. Trump, who was charged over the summer with obstructing the government’s efforts to reclaim classified materials at his resort in Florida, is likely to seize on the report to downplay his own legal woes — and to claim the Justice Department has targeted him politically while letting Mr. Biden escape punishment.But Mr. Hur’s investigation does not appear to be comparable in scope or seriousness to Mr. Trump’s retention of sensitive government documents.Mr. Biden’s lawyers immediately notified the National Archives and Records Administration upon discovering a cache of classified documents in late 2022 when they were closing an office in Washington he occupied after leaving the vice presidency in 2017. They have since cooperated with the Justice Department, and gave the F.B.I. access to his house in Wilmington, Del., where they discovered more material.Mr. Trump, by contrast, repeatedly resisted requests from the National Archives, which is responsible for storing sensitive White House documents, initially turned over only a portion of what he had taken when he left office in January 2021. He failed to fully respond to a subpoena to return the rest and ultimately was subjected to a search of his home and office by F.B.I. agents with a warrant.Last January, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland appointed Mr. Hur, a veteran prosecutor who worked in the Trump administration, to examine “the possible unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or other records discovered” after Mr. Biden left the Obama administration.With the exception of President Barack Obama, every occupant of the Oval Office since Watergate has confronted a special prosecutor scrutinizing him or members of his staff, sometimes for relatively narrow matters but at other times for issues that have mushroomed into the threat of impeachment. More

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      Prosecutors in Documents Case Reject Trump’s Claims of Bias

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      The office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, pushed back on the former president’s assertions that his prosecution was motivated by animosity toward him in intelligence agencies.Federal prosecutors pushed back on Friday against former President Donald J. Trump’s contention that his prosecution over the handling of classified documents was motivated by a longstanding bias against him among the intelligence agencies and other government officials.The pushback by the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, came in a 67-page court filing. The filing was intended to argue against Mr. Trump’s requests for additional discovery materials in the classified documents case.When Mr. Trump’s lawyers made those requests for materials last month, they signaled that they planned to place accusations that the intelligence community and other members of the so-called deep state were biased against Mr. Trump at the heart of their defense.But Mr. Smith’s team said that the former president’s requests for additional information were “based on speculative, unsupported, and false theories of political bias and animus.”Some of Mr. Trump’s demands for discovery were so ambiguous “that it is difficult to decipher what they seek,” the prosecutors wrote, while others, they added, “reflect pure conjecture detached from the facts surrounding this prosecution.”Discovery disputes can be contentious in criminal cases as defense lawyers push for as much information as they can get and prosecutors seek to limit access to materials that they believe are irrelevant.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Material From Russia Investigation Went Missing as Trump Left Office

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      A binder given to the Trump White House contained details that intelligence agencies believe could reveal secret sources and methods.Material from a binder with highly classified information connected to the investigation into Russian efforts to meddle in the 2016 election disappeared in the final days of Donald J. Trump’s presidency, two people familiar with the matter said.The disappearance of the material, known as the “Crossfire Hurricane” binder for the name given to the investigation by the F.B.I., vexed national security officials and set off concerns that sensitive information could be inappropriately shared, one of the people said.The material’s disappearance was reported earlier Friday by CNN. The matter was so concerning to officials that the Senate Intelligence Committee was briefed about it last year, a U.S. official said.The binder consists of a hodgepodge of materials related to the origins and early stages of the Russia investigation that were collected by Trump administration officials. They included copies of botched F.B.I. applications for national-security surveillance warrants to wiretap a former Trump campaign adviser as well as text messages between two F.B.I. officials involved in the inquiry, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, expressing animus toward Mr. Trump.The substance of the material — a redacted version of which has since been made public under the Freedom of Information Act and is posted on the website of the F.B.I. — is not considered particularly sensitive, the official said.But the raw version in the binder contained details that intelligence agencies believe could reveal secret sources and methods. (The publicly available version contains numerous portions that were whited out as classified.)It is not clear if the missing material comprises the entire original binder of material provided to the White House for Mr. Trump’s team to review and declassify in part before leaving office. Among other murky details, it is not known how many copies were made at the White House or how the government knows one set is missing.The binder has been a source of recurring attention since January 2021, just before Mr. Trump left office. At the time, Mr. Trump’s aides prepared redactions to some of the material it contained because the president — who was obsessed with the Russia investigation and believed his political enemies had used it to damage his presidency — planned to declassify it and make it public.Officials made several copies of the version with the redactions, which some Trump aides planned to release publicly.Mr. Trump’s White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, had a copy of material from the binder given to at least one conservative writer, according to testimony and court filings.But when Justice Department officials expressed concerns that sharing some of the material would breach the Privacy Act at a time when the department was already being sued by Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page for having publicly released some of their texts, the copies were hastily retrieved, according to two people familiar with the matter.Mr. Trump was deeply focused on what was in the binder, a person close to him said. Even after leaving the White House, Mr. Trump still wanted to push information from the binder into the public eye. He suggested, during an April 2021 interview for a book about the Trump presidency, that Mr. Meadows still had the material.“I would let you look at them if you wanted,” Mr. Trump said in the interview. “It’s a treasure trove.”Mr. Trump did not address a question about whether he himself had some of the material. But when a Trump aide present for the interview asked him, “Does Meadows have those?” Mr. Trump replied, “Meadows has them.”“We had pretty much won that battle,” Mr. Trump added, referring to questions about whether his 2016 campaign had worked with Russia. “There was no collusion. There was no nothing. And I think it was maybe past its prime. It would be sort of a cool book for you to look at.”George J. Terwilliger III, a lawyer for Mr. Meadows, said the former chief of staff was not responsible for any missing material. “Mark never took any copy of that binder home at any time,” he said.A person familiar with the matter said, shortly after the court-authorized search of Mar-a-Lago in August 2022 by F.B.I. agents looking for classified documents, that they had not found any Crossfire Hurricane material.Adding to the confusion about the material and who was in possession of it, a set of the Russia investigation documents that Mr. Trump believed he had declassified did not have their classification markings changed when they were given to the National Archives, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.At the time, Mr. Trump was in a standoff with the archives over the reams of presidential material he had taken with him upon leaving the White House on Jan. 20, 2021, and was resisting giving back. So Mr. Trump told advisers he would give back those boxes in exchange for the Russia-related documents.Aides never pursued his suggestion.In the run-up to the 2020 election, John Ratcliffe, then Mr. Trump’s director of national intelligence, declassified around 1,000 pages of intelligence materials related to the Russia investigation, which Trump allies used to try to discredit the inquiry.In 2022, Mr. Trump made John Solomon, a conservative writer who had been briefly given the binder before it was retrieved, one of his representatives to the National Archives. This allowed Mr. Solomon to see Trump White House records deposited with the agency. He later filed a lawsuit against the government asking a court to order the Justice Department to send the binder to the archives so that he could have access to it.A court filing he submitted in August described the binder as about 10 inches thick and containing about 2,700 pages. The publicly released version includes fewer than 600 pages, many heavily redacted; it is not clear what accounts for the discrepancy.The filing said Mr. Solomon had been allowed to thumb through a version of the binder at the White House on Jan. 19, 2021. The contents, it said, included a 2017 F.B.I. report about its interview of Christopher Steele, the author of a dossier of unverified claims about Trump-Russia ties; “tasking orders” related to an F.B.I. confidential human source; “lightly-redacted” copies of botched surveillance warrant applications; and text messages between the F.B.I. officials.The filing said Mr. Solomon or an aide had gone back to the White House that evening and had been given a copy of the materials in the binder in a paper bag, and that separately a Justice Department envelope containing some of the documents had been delivered to his office.But as Mr. Solomon’s office was scanning the larger set, the filing said, the White House requested that the documents be returned so certain private details could be removed. Mr. Meadows promised Mr. Solomon he would get back the revised binder, it said, but he never did.When Mr. Solomon later tried to see the binder within the Trump White House records at the National Archives, he said, the agency denied him access to a box of 2,700 pages “with varying types of classification and declassification markings” that it said it was obligated to treat as highly classified. The agency also told him it did not have the declassified version of the binder that Mr. Solomon had briefly possessed, because the Justice Department still has it. More