Washington — On Tuesday evening, the Trump administration published tens of thousands of pages of federal records linked to President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 murder, weeks after ordering government departments to make their JFK files public.
The National Archives and papers Administration, which houses the government’s collection of assassination-related papers, uploaded the documents. The Archives said on Tuesday that “all records previously withheld for classification” had been released, albeit not all are presently accessible online.
Shortly after taking office in January, the president issued an executive order to create a mechanism for declassifying and releasing any remaining papers relating to Kennedy’s death, as well as the killings of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. The order directed the director of national intelligence and the attorney general to submit 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 said that it had unearthed some 2,400 documents relating to the killing following a search prompted by Mr. Trump’s unilateral move.
What’s in the newly released JFK files?
Mr. Trump calculated that the additional files include around 80,000 pages. CBS News has a team of reporters poring through the data to see whether ones reveal fresh information.
Many of the materials were believed to be unredacted copies of previously published, but partly concealed papers.
Researchers anticipate that over 3,000 documents relating to the case have still to be fully published. Tuesday’s online release includes 1,123 papers of varied lengths.
Various investigations into the JFK murder throughout the years, some as recently as the 1990s, uncovered secret material on intelligence collecting tactics and sympathetic foreign countries that were unrelated to the killing itself. For decades, portions of papers, as well as complete records, have been classified to protect sources and techniques.
On Tuesday evening, David Barrett, a Villanova University political science professor who studied the Kennedy administration, examined the records. He spoke to CBS News on 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 researchers like him, however, he said 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 ties with Miami media, for example, and information on three CIA operatives doing technical intelligence gathering in Cuba—I’ve never received those data before,” he added.
Before the publication, Barrett said that he did not anticipate “earth-shaking information, either regarding the assassination or more broadly.” “But, you never know,” he said.
Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics and author of “The Kennedy Half-Century,” told the Associated Press that his team is reviewing the disclosed files for a “long, long list” of crucial papers that were previously severely classified. He thinks some of the sections may be about Cuba or “what the CIA did or didn’t do relevant to Lee Harvey Oswald,” Kennedy’s murderer.
Where to read the new JFK assassination files
The records have been uploaded to a portal hosted by the National Archives, which may be accessed here. The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection, which is maintained by the Archives, is a goldmine of official records.
However, not all of the files are now accessible online. Some are accessible “in person, via hard copy, or on analog media formats” at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence said that documents that are only accessible in person are being digitized and will be posted to the Archives in the coming days. Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence, will provide updates via social media, and the documents will also be available on the White House website.
Additional records remain under court seal, including some due to grand jury secrecy. Other IRS-related records must be opened before distribution, and the Archives and Justice Department are trying to make them public.
According to the Mary Ferrell Foundation, a charity that gathers historical government papers regarding the JFK murder and other events, around 3,500 pages in the official collection were redacted prior to the most recent release. The CIA created about 75% of these documents. More than 500 more documents were kept from the public altogether.
The Mary Ferrell Foundation maintains its own JFK document archive on its website, which includes advanced search options for researching the vast collection of materials. The group usually adds new papers soon after they are provided by the Archives.
Why did Trump release these JFK files?
Mr. Trump campaigned on declassifying and disclosing data linked to the JFK assassination, in part because of his political alliance with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has long advocated for more openness in the killings of his uncle and father.
Congress established a bill in 1992 mandating the government to reveal all data related to the killing by October 2017, but allowing the president to withhold records for national security grounds. Mr. Trump released hundreds of records during his first term, but the CIA and FBI lobbied to keep some of their contents secret. Other documents were suppressed entirely.
President Biden released thousands of documents in 2021 and 2022 while keeping critical sections redacted, upsetting scholars and others who had been calling for their complete release for years.
When was JFK assassinated?
Kennedy, 46, was shot in the head on November 22, 1963, while traveling in a convertible in Dallas, Texas. Oswald, a former Marine and communist activist who had resided in the Soviet Union, was quickly apprehended for the murder. However, Oswald was also shot and murdered in the basement of the Dallas police headquarters two days later.
In the 62 years following the assassination, scholars and historians have extensively questioned Chief Justice Earl Warren’s inquiry, which determined that Oswald acted alone in murdering Kennedy.
Oswald had been on the government’s radar before to the killing. 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 organization and spoke with Soviet and Cuban consulates in the months before Kennedy’s assassination.
In October 1963, the CIA intercepted a phone call he made to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City, however the full consequences of the exchange are unknown. In 2022, some further papers on the wiretap operation were made public.
Longtime JFK watchers have hoped that the documents that have been redacted or withheld by the government would reveal more information about Oswald’s activities in Mexico City and what else federal agencies knew about him before the shooting.