2025-07-22
9 分钟I'm Julian Barnes.
I'm an intelligence reporter at the New York Times.
I try to find out what the US government is keeping secret.
It takes a lot of time to find people willing to talk about those secrets.
It requires talking to a lot of people to make sure that we're not misled and that we give a complete story to our readers.
If the New York Times was not reporting these stories, some of them might never come to light.
If you want to support this kind of work, you can do that by subscribing to The New York Times.
The Trump administration released a massive collection of documents related to the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. yesterday,
posting more than a quarter million pages to the National Archives website.
The document dump came as President Trump and White House officials had been trying to divert attention from demands to release files related to Jeffrey Epstein.
The administration framed the release of the King files as an act of transparency.
I was part of a team of reporters who went through all the records and talked to historians to try to figure out the significance of it all.
And the big takeaway is it doesn't seem like there's very much there.
My colleague Rick Rojas says many of the pages are almost impossible to read
because they're so old or because of how they were digitized.
There are news clippings, tips from the public,
and some random details about King's killer James Earl Ray,
including how he took dance classes and pulled aliases from James Bond novels.
What wasn't included is something that historians and others who've been following this history have been waiting years for,
which are the FBI wiretaps and other findings from government surveillance into Dr. King.