To coincide with the 60th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, his nephew, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has launched a petition calling for the Biden administration to release the last of the government’s records related to the historic shooting.

“What is so embarrassing that they’re afraid to show the American public 60 years later?” Kennedy Jr., who is running for president as an independent candidate, said in a statement Monday.

In 1992, Congress passed the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, which mandated that materials related to John F. Kennedy’s killing be housed in a single collection in the National Archives and Records Administration and that all records be publicly disclosed by 2017. 

Former President Donald Trump, who had vowed to release all the assassination-related documents, made more than 53,000 publicly available, according to the National Archives. But he postponed the release of some, citing “identifiable national security, law enforcement, and foreign affairs concerns.”

This July, Trump again promised to release the remaining documents if he is elected president again.

In October 2021, President Joe Biden issued a memorandum setting a December 2022 deadline for the public disclosure of the documents that remained classified, a deadline he later extended to June 2023.

The Biden administration has released more than 17,000 documents. On June 30, the president certified that federal agencies had made available “every single word that is appropriate for release under the standards of the Act.”

Biden, however, agreed to continue withholding some information, saying it is “necessary to protect against identifiable harms to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, and the conduct of foreign relations that are of such gravity that they outweigh the public interest in disclosure.”

To date, 99% of the Kennedy assassination files have been released, according to the National Archives.

Kennedy Jr. says releasing the full, unredacted records would help restore trust in the government. 

“In the spirit of transparency, in the spirit of democracy, we, the undersigned, call upon President Biden to obey the 1992 act and release the Kennedy assassination documents to the public,” the petition says.

The White House did not respond to an email Tuesday from Spectrum News asking about Kennedy Jr.’s request. 

The Kennedy Jr. campaign said Monday the petition would be launched Wednesday, the anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s death, but it was already live as of Tuesday afternoon.

John F. Kennedy was fatally shot while riding in a presidential motorcade in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. Lee Harvey Oswald, a 24-year-old Marine veteran, was charged with killing the president. Two days after the assassination, nightclub owner Jack Ruby shot and killed Oswald in the basement of a Dallas police station, an incident broadcast on live television.

The Kennedy assassination has spurred a bevy of conspiracy theories. A Gallup poll released last week found that about two-thirds of U.S. adults think Oswald worked in concert with others to kill the president.

Kennedy Jr. is the son of Robert F. Kennedy, who served as U.S. attorney general in his brother John’s administration and later as a U.S. senator representing New York.

Robert F. Kennedy Sr. was, too, assassinated in 1968 when Sirhan Sirhan shot him multiple times after the then-presidential candidate delivered a primary night speech at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.