(Ken Silva, Headline USA) In response to concerns from Martin Luther King Jr.’s family about potentially damaging FBI surveillance recordings of the civil rights leader being released as part of President Donald Trump’s pro-transparency efforts, the Justice Department said Thursday that it only intends to publish records about MLK Jr.’s assassination.
The DOJ’s Thursday filing comes weeks after it moved to unseal FBI records about MLK Jr. Those records were sealed pursuant to a nearly 50-year-old lawsuit filed by King associate Bernard Lee and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference against the FBI in June 1976. That lawsuit stems from allegations that the FBI unconstitutionally monitored the conversations of King and other Conference members.
In 1977, U.S. judge dismissed the lawsuit, but ordered the FBI to provide surveillance tapes and related documents to the National Archives as a “compromise.” Those recordings and documents were sealed by court order in 1977 for 50 years, and were set to remain classified until January 31, 2027.
UPDATE: The DOJ says it will only release MLK Jr. records related to his assassination — and not any FBI recordings or other documents that might tarnish his legacy.
The DOJ’s Thursday filing comes weeks after it moved to unseal FBI records about MLK Jr.
King's family objects… https://t.co/Zp56Bmytvq pic.twitter.com/letTDo9FYm
— Ken Silva (@JD_Cashless) April 25, 2025
The DOJ has argued that the records should be released now since the Trump administration is about to publish a trove of MLK Jr. assassination records—and so publishing them all at once would assist scholars in their research. MLK Jr.’s family objects to that on numerous grounds, including that the records might tarnish King’s legacy, and that some of them may even be “fake.”
“We understand that the purpose of these recordings was to discredit our father and harm the civil rights cause that he championed. Some, perhaps many, of the recordings may be fake,” King’s eldest son, Martin Luther King III, said in a sworn declaration this month.
MLK Jr.’s family may have reason to be concerned. FBI records have been released in the past that accuse King of sexual misconduct.
However, the DOJ’s Thursday filing sought to reassure the King family that only assassination-related records will be made public.
“The Attorney General will not seek to disclose any attorney-client privileged or personal communications as part of its response to the Executive Order. Indeed, the Executive Order directs the Attorney General to release only materials about the King assassination,” the DOJ said Thursday.
“And because the FBI’s surveillance recordings of the Reverend King and the SCLC occurred prior to the assassination on April 4, 1968, the surveillance tapes and transcripts themselves will presumably not be related to the assassination and therefore generally not released to the public,” the DOJ added.
“Finally, SCLC implies that the public may be misled by the release of the sealed records because the FBI’s motivations for surveilling the Reverend King were ‘corrupt.’ But there is no reason to suspect that any assassination-related material in the sealed records would unfairly malign the Reverend King. Nor is there any reason to credit SCLC’s unsupported speculation that some of the sealed materials ‘may be fake.’”
It’s not clear when a judge will rule on the matter. Either way, the records in the King lawsuit are set to be unsealed in January 2027.
Ken Silva is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/jd_cashless.
