By Zachary B. Wolf, CNN

(CNN) — The US attorney in Washington, DC, arguing the public needs to know the “truth” about the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., filed a motion to speed up by two years the release of FBI files related to the civil rights icon.

Appearing at the White House on Friday, Trump also referred to sealed files on King.

“They’re going to release everything,” he said.

The material, sealed since 1977, apparently includes tapes and transcripts of FBI surveillance of the civil rights icon before his death, including unflattering and prurient details about King’s relationships with women that could tarnish the legacy of a man whose image is chiseled in granite in a monument off the National Mall.

President Donald Trump, a noted conspiracy theorist, has publicly championed transparency, notably for files related to the JFK assassination, even as his administration has embraced secrecy in its effort to dismantle parts of the federal government. That apparent contradiction raises questions about why the administration wants the MLK files to be released early.

Is it to let the public know what the government knows? Or is it to highlight the human faults of a civil rights icon at a time when Trump’s administration is moving to purge the government of diversity initiatives rooted in the civil rights movement that King championed?

While there are serious questions about King’s killing by James Earl Ray, King’s family has opposed early release of the material, fearing it could be used to tarnish his legacy.

I talked to Jonathan Eig, author of “King: A Life,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography that looks at King’s accomplishments and his faults. Eig obtained access to some FBI files in writing the book, so I wanted to ask him how he views the prospect of the public having access to tapes of the FBI — on orders from then-Director J. Edgar Hoover and with the authorization of then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy — recording an American hero in order to smear him.

Our conversation, conducted by phone and edited for length and clarity, is below.

Why do the FBI’s MLK files exist?

WOLF: Why does the FBI have files on Martin Luther King Jr?

EIG: Surveillance of King began in the early ‘60s, when the Kennedy administration became concerned that he might have been associating with members of the Communist Party in the United States.

That surveillance was approved by Robert F. Kennedy, was requested by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, and once they began listening to those tapes, it became clear that King wasn’t really involved in anything related to communism.

But they found the wiretaps of his phones and his associates’ phones useful in that they gathered dirt, basically. They were able to hear King on the phone with women. They treated him as an adversary — somebody who it would help to have to have dirt on.

That’s why we have transcripts of King’s phone calls and also audio tape of not only his phone calls, but activities in his hotel rooms, because some of the hotel rooms were also bugged.

Is there reason to be skeptical of the most salacious allegations?

WOLF: The National Archives has already released, as part of an earlier dump of JFK-related files, a salacious FBI memo that graphically refer to King engaging in adultery with multiple women. At the same time, there’s this feeling that the FBI may have been engaged in a smear campaign and making things up. Can we believe what’s in these documents?

EIG: I think we can be fairly confident when we read transcripts of phone calls that those are accurate. According to people who’ve read those transcripts, some of the people who were on those phone calls have read the transcripts, people like Andrew Young, people like Bayard Rustin, who, when he was alive, said that the FBI was accurately transcribing their phone calls.

But we also have to be very skeptical about claims the FBI makes regarding King, because we know that many FBI agents felt like they would gain favor with their boss by smearing King and by painting him in an unfavorable light. So when we see things like memos that are not transcriptions of conversations, or when we see handwritten notes in the margins of memos saying that King was doing immoral things, we have to be much more skeptical. That’s one reason why the tapes would be interesting — because it might help us better understand just how reliable the FBI’s reporting is.

What is the Trump administration’s motivation here?

WOLF: Where do you stand on releasing all this stuff, and the tapes, in particular? If they show what some of the things described, it could seriously tarnish his legacy. But at the same time, there’s a desire for transparency and to know what the FBI was doing.

EIG: In general, I am in favor of transparency, and I think we have a right to know how the FBI was treating King. I think that is more important than how King was behaving in his personal life. I don’t really have any opinion on whether it should be released ahead of schedule.

I am concerned that the reason the government wants to release it ahead of schedule is so that they can continue this campaign to attack diversity, attack civil rights, and if the reason they want to speed up the release of these tapes is in order to attack King and to undermine his role as an icon, as a hero. If the goal is to diminish King’s stature, then I think they’re doing it for the wrong reasons.

What else is to be learned from the FBI’s files and tapes?

WOLF: In your book, you talk about reviewing a lot of FBI files. Do you think that you’ve seen most of what is under seal, or is there other stuff out there that will come as a shock?

EIG: I think I’ve seen enough to know what else is on those tapes. I think the big issue will be how people respond to hearing King’s voice. And that troubles me. The idea if we have his voice, and we can hear him, even just having conversations that are not flattering, that will be used by certain people to attack King. We really ought to be focused here on the FBI’s behavior, not King’s behavior.

The FBI actively tried to smear King

WOLF: The FBI wasn’t just gathering surveillance. It was actively involved in trying to smear him. How did that work?

EIG: It worked very well. The FBI was very effective in smearing King, damaging the Civil Rights Movement and making his life miserable. They released the details of his phone calls and his personal life to members of the media, which affected how the media covered King. Even if they didn’t write about his sex life, they were aware of it, and I think that it tarnished his image. The press treated him much more skeptically.

It also had the effect of dividing members of the Civil Rights Movement. It made it harder for King to work with other activists, because his reputation was under attack, and because he was losing popularity. By 1966, something like two-thirds of all Americans in a Gallup survey said they disapproved of Martin Luther King, so it was making his job much more difficult. It was making him feel lost and at times sad that no one seemed to be listening to him anymore. So I think the FBI’s campaign against King was largely very effective.

How did King react to being spied on?

WOLF: You write that he knew about it in real time. Did he do anything about it?

EIG: Not much. He did have a meeting with J. Edgar Hoover, but the meeting was fairly nonconfrontational. King waffled a little bit. Some of his colleagues were advising him to be more aggressive and to call out Hoover and to complain publicly about this surveillance. And King did not do that.

Now there’s another new regime at the FBI

WOLF: We’re talking about the FBI spying on Americans and trying to smear them in the 1960s. Now we have a new regime in charge at the FBI, and they are actively looking into President Trump’s political opponents. Do you see echoes of the previous FBI in what we are learning about today?

EIG: I think law enforcement in this country has always been surveilling private citizens. I don’t think there’s anything new in this administration, but I think that what we learned from the King surveillance is that there should be a much higher standard for when the government chooses to invade the privacy of private citizens.

Why MLK should be viewed as a Founding Father

WOLF: The larger point of your book is that King should be viewed not only as a civil rights icon, but as a Founding Father. You wrote that after knowing all of the stuff that the FBI gathered on him.

EIG: I think King should be recognized as one of our greatest heroes, and his personal affairs should have nothing to do with that. Plenty of our founding fathers, the signers of the Constitution, had affairs. Some of them had affairs with women who they enslaved.

Our heroes are often flawed, but we have to look beyond that. To me, what matters is that King, knowing the government was surveilling him, knowing he was under attack, that he was arrested 29 times, chose to continue this life of service to the public and to sacrifice for what he believed America could be. He believed in the potential of this country, and he was willing to fight for it, even as the even as this country treated him so badly.

What about the Malcolm X files?

WOLF: Did I miss anything on this topic?

EIG: I think it would be much more interesting and useful if they released the FBI information on the assassination of Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam at that time. That would be, to me, a better use of the government resources.

WOLF: What do you think we would learn?

EIG: I don’t know, but I think that there are still questions about who was involved in the assassination of Malcolm X; that there are probably answers in some of those files.

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