Reason why classified JFK assassination files haven't been released before

Questions have long been raised about John F Kennedy's assassination.

The former president was killed in 1963 while visiting Dallas, Texas, with his wife Jacqueline Kennedy.

24-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald went on to be arrested for Kennedy's murder, and it was later ruled that the former Marine had acted alone.

While this was the official ruling, it hasn't stop people putting forward their own conspiracy theories about what may have happened to JFK.

Some people have suggested that Oswald was framed and that there was a second shooter who was responsible for the president's shooting, while others have raised questions about the theory about the 'magic bullet' shot by Oswald that went through JFK's neck and into Texas Governor John Connally Jr.

An investigation into JFK's passing was conducted by the Warren Commission, which was created by President Lyndon B. Johnson, a year after his death.

Fast-forward to the early 1990s, and the federal government mandated that all assassination-related documents (thought to be as many as five million files) be housed in a single collection in the National Archives and Records Administration, AP reports.

President John F Kennedy was fatally shot in 1963 (NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images)

This collection was to be unsealed by 2017, unless the president at the time ruled otherwise.

Trump took office for the first time that year, and allowed the release of the records — but he held some back.

As to why he did that, apparently releasing them would have been a threat to national security.

As per POLITICO, Trump sided with the FBI and CIA (who have long been campaigning to keep the documents sealed) and agreed to waive the 2017 legal deadline that year to release all classified documents related to the JFK assassination.

But files continued to be slowly unsealed when Joe Biden was in office, but to this day, some are still under lock and key.

Trump has signed a series of executive orders this week (ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP via Getty Images)

More recently, Trump has done a U-turn on his 2017 actions and signed an executive order on Thursday (January 23) telling the director of national intelligence and attorney general to spend the next few days coming up with a plan to release the final CIA files in question.

It's thought that around 3,000 remain classified, Larry J. Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics and author of The Kennedy Half-Century, said.

As to why the CIA are so fixated on them remaining sealed, one expert has suggested that they could have damning information about the intelligence agency's handling of the situation.

I guess only time will tell...