More than 60 years after President John F. Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas, the federal government began releasing what could be the final trove of documents delving into the assassination that shocked the nation and spawned countless conspiracy theories.
The Justice Department’s National Security Division on Tuesday started unveiling the long-awaited files a day after President Donald Trump announced that 80,000 pages related to the fatal Nov. 22, 1963, shooting were about to be released.
“You got a lot of reading,” Trump said while visiting the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. “I don’t believe we’re going to redact anything.”
Trump was cagey about what would be in those files, but historians contend that there are around 4,700 documents that haven’t yet been released.
“The origins of the 80,000 pages of material are unknown,” Jefferson Morley, an expert on the JFK assassination and the CIA, wrote on his JFK Facts blog.
DOJ lawyers worked all night to review hundreds of pages of classified documents before they were released, a person familiar with the matter told NBC News.
It remains to be seen whether this document drop will finally put to rest the widespread public skepticism of the government’s official explanation of who killed Kennedy — a lone gunman named Lee Harvey Oswald who fired the fatal shots from the Texas Schoolbook Depository.
“People have so many doubts,” presidential historian Michael Beschloss said. “There are so many theories that are conflicting. It’s very hard for me to imagine that there will be one piece of evidence that will make everyone agree on what happened here. What most people do agree is that the killing of John Kennedy changed history, and mainly in a bad way.”
When Trump was campaigning last year and trying to win the endorsement of JFK’s nephew, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., he renewed his promise to release the files.
Hours after snagging RFK Jr.’s endorsement in August, Trump vowed that if elected, he would establish a commission on assassination attempts in honor of RFK Jr., who is now the Trump administration’s secretary of Health and Human Services.
Shortly after he began his second term, Trump signed an executive order mandating the release of all records related to President Kennedy’s assassination, as well as the 1968 assassinations of RFK Jr.’s father, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy Sr., and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
But under the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, all the documents related to the assassination were supposed to be released by 2017, when Trump was president the first time.
Trump released some JFK-related documents then, but he also gave the intelligence agencies more time to assess the remaining files.
It wasn’t until December 2022 that President Joe Biden released more than 13,000 records after the Mary Ferrell Foundation, the nation’s largest nonprofit repository of the JFK assassination records, sued the administration to make all the documents public.
But Biden only released about 98% of all the documents related to the killing that remained in the National Archives, which controls the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection.
“It’s high time that the government got its act together and obeyed the spirit and the letter of the law,” Morley, who is also the vice president of the nonpartisan Mary Ferrell Foundation, said at the time.
“This is about our history and our right to know it,” said Morley.
The 4,700 or so records that were kept under wraps were believed to have included more information on accused Oswald’s sojourn in Mexico City before the JFK assassination.
Among those documents were 44 related to then-CIA agent George Joannides and a covert Cuba-related program he ran that came into contact with Oswald less than four months before Kennedy was shot, according to calculations made by JFK researchers with the Mary Ferrell Foundation.
In a memorandum explaining why some documents were not being released, Biden noted that the records act “permits the continued postponement of disclosure of information … only when postponement remains necessary to protect against an identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or the conduct of foreign relations that is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure.”
Prominent historians didn’t buy that explanation.
“We’re 59 years after President John Kennedy was killed and there’s just no justification for this,” Judge John Tunheim, who chaired the Assassination Records Review Board from 1994 to 1998, said when Biden released the records.
