(Newser) - The government released 676 documents it said were related to the assassination of John F. Kennedy Friday-including a 20-page FBI file on Martin Luther King, Jr. The file, dated less than a month before the civil rights leader's April, 1968 assassination, claims King had close ties to the Communist Party and engaged in scandalous behavior including extramarital affairs, one of them with singer Joan Baez, the New York Daily News reports.The file claims King engaged in "sexual aberrations" and says a minister who attended a training workshop in early 1968 was disgusted with the "behind-the-scene drinking, fornication, and homosexuality that went on at the conference."
It's not clear whether any of the information in the report on King was verified by the FBI, nor is it known why the file, which makes no mention of JFK, ended up among the assassination-related documents, CNN reports. Clayborne Carson of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute says the file appears to be part of then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's attempts to discredit King. The files released Friday also state that CIA records were thoroughly searched to see whether assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was connected to the agency in "any conceivable way," and investigators determined that claims he had CIA links were "totally unfounded," the AP reports.
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