Washington – On Tuesday evening, the Trump administration released tens of thousands of pages of government documents related to President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination, weeks after ordering government agencies to make their JFK files public.
The National Archives and Records Administration, which houses the government’s collection of assassination-related records, uploaded the documents. The Archives announced on Tuesday that “all records previously withheld for classification” had been released, though not all are yet available online.
Shortly after taking office in January, the president issued an executive order to establish a process for declassifying and releasing any remaining documents related to Kennedy’s death, as well as the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. The order directed the director of national intelligence and the attorney general to present the president with a plan for the “full and complete release of records relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.”
Last month, the FBI announced that it had discovered approximately 2,400 records related to the assassination during a search prompted by Mr. Trump’s executive action.
What’s in the newly released JFK files?
Mr. Trump estimated that the new files contain approximately 80,000 pages. CBS News has a team of reporters sifting through the records to determine which documents contain new information.
Many of the records were expected to be unredacted versions of previously released, but partially obscured documents.
Researchers estimate that approximately 3,000 records related to the case have yet to be fully released. Tuesday’s online release includes 1,123 documents of varying lengths.
Various investigations into the JFK assassination over the years, some as recently as the 1990s, uncovered classified information about intelligence gathering methods and friendly foreign governments that were unrelated to the assassination itself. For decades, portions of documents, as well as entire records, had been classified to protect sources and methods.
On Tuesday evening, David Barrett, a Villanova University political science professor who studies the Kennedy presidency, examined the documents. He spoke to CBS News about how “non-scholars who dive into these documents are going to be baffled as to what most of them have to do with the Kennedy or other assassinations.” For scholars like him, however, he stated that it is “certainly the most useful release of documents that has occurred because of the redactions being removed.”
“I now understand who or what is being referred to. So a memorandum on CIA relations with Miami newspapers, for example, and information on three CIA officers conducting technical intelligence collection in Cuba—I have never had those details before,” he said.
Before the release, Barrett stated that he did not expect “earth-shaking information, either regarding the assassination or more broadly.” “But, you never know,” he continued.
Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Centre for Politics and author of “The Kennedy Half-Century,” told the Associated Press that his team is reviewing the released files for a “long, long list” of sensitive documents that were previously heavily redacted. He believes some of the passages may be about Cuba or “what the CIA did or did not do relevant to Lee Harvey Oswald,” Kennedy’s assassin.
Where to read the new JFK assassination files
The documents have been uploaded to a portal hosted by the National Archives, which can be found here. The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection, which is maintained by the Archives, is a trove of government records.
However, not all of the files are currently available online. Some are accessible “in person, via hard copy, or on analogue media formats” at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence announced that records that are only available in person are being digitised and will be uploaded to the Archives in the coming days.
Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence, will provide updates via social media, and the records will also be available on the White House website.
Additional documents remain under court seal, including some due to grand jury secrecy. Other IRS-related documents must be unsealed before release, and the Archives and Justice Department are working to make them available.
According to the Mary Ferrell Foundation, a nonprofit that compiles historical government records about the JFK assassination and other events, approximately 3,500 documents in the official collection were redacted prior to the most recent release. The CIA produced approximately 75% of these records. More than 500 other records were kept from the public entirely.
The Mary Ferrell Foundation maintains its own JFK document repository on its website, which includes advanced search functions for exploring the vast collection of records. The group usually adds new documents soon after they are released by the Archives.
Why did Trump release these JFK files?
Mr. Trump campaigned on declassifying and releasing records related to the JFK assassination, in part because of his political alliance with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has long advocated for greater transparency in the assassinations of his uncle and father.
Congress passed a law in 1992 requiring the government to release all records related to the assassination by October 2017, while allowing the president to withhold records for national security reasons. Mr. Trump released thousands of documents during his first term, but the CIA and FBI lobbied to keep some of their contents secret. Other records were withheld entirely.
President Biden released thousands of records in 2021 and 2022 while keeping key portions redacted, frustrating researchers and observers who had been calling for their full release for years.
When was JFK assassinated?
Kennedy, 46, was shot in the head on November 22, 1963, while riding in a convertible in Dallas, Texas. Oswald, a former Marine and communist activist who had lived in the Soviet Union, was quickly arrested for the murder. However, Oswald was also shot and killed in the basement of the Dallas police headquarters two days later.
In the 62 years since the assassination, academics and historians have widely criticised Chief Justice Earl Warren’s investigation, which concluded that Oswald acted alone in shooting Kennedy.
Oswald had been on the government’s radar prior to the assassination. He defected to the Soviet Union in 1959, returning to the United States in 1962. He was a self-proclaimed Marxist who worked with a pro-Fidel Castro activist group and communicated with Soviet and Cuban consulates in the months before Kennedy’s death.
In October 1963, the CIA intercepted a phone call he made to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City, though the full implications of the conversation are unknown. In 2022, some additional documents about the wiretap operation were made public.
Long-time JFK watchers had hoped that the government’s redacted or withheld documents would reveal more information about Oswald’s activities in Mexico City and what else federal agencies knew about him prior to the shooting.
