President John F. Kennedy slumps down in the back seat of the Presidential limousine as it speeds along Elm Street toward the Stemmons Freeway overpass after being fatally shot in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy leans over the president as Secret Service agent Clinton Hill rides on the back of the car. | Ike Altgens/AP Photo
President Donald Trump on Thursday delayed the release of some documents relating to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, while allowing the National Archives to post 2,800 other pages that had yet to be made public.
Trump is holding back an unspecific number of documents at the request mainly of the FBI and CIA, according to a White House official, and has directed federal agencies to re-review the remaining files, giving them 180 days to do so. The documents being held back include redacted information, and are not being immediately released due to national security concerns.
The president had been hyping the release of the trove on Twitter in recent days, tweeting on Saturday that “subject to the receipt of further information,” he would allow “the long blocked and classified JFK FILES to be opened.” On Wednesday, he teased the release again, tweeting that “the long anticipated release” of the files would take place Thursday, calling them, “So interesting!”
Trump released a memo on Thursday explaining why he had decided to block — at least temporarily — the release of some files.
“The American public expects — and deserves — its Government to provide as much access as possible to the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records so that the people may finally be fully informed about all aspects of this pivotal event,” the president said.
He added that some executive departments and agencies had proposed that certain information should remain redacted “because of national security, law enforcement, and foreign affairs concerns.”
“I have no choice — today — but to accept those redactions rather than allow potentially irreversible harm to our Nation’s security,” the president wrote.
The 2,800 files that were fully released late Thursday will prove deeply interesting to researchers trying to connect more dots in the JFK saga
Many appear to be on subjects of intense speculation.
They include files from the CIA’s station in Mexico City, where alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald visited in the weeks before Kennedy’s assassination. There are also documents mentioning James Jesus Angleton, the agency’s counterintelligence chief at the time who took over the CIA’s post-assassination investigation. One of his communications with the CIA director is dated Nov. 23, 1963, a day after the assassination and is described as about “assassination of President Kennedy.”
Others are about E. Howard Hunt, a CIA operative who was later linked to the break-in at the Watergate Hotel that eventually led to the impeachment of President Richard Nixon.
The law, which mandated the release of all documents related to Kennedy’s assassination, was signed by then-President George H.W. Bush in response to “JFK,” the conspiracy-filled Oscar-winning movie from Oliver Stone that had been released a year earlier. The law ordered the immediate release of thousands of pages of documents and set the 25-year deadline for the release of the 3,100 yet-unseen documents as well as the full, unredacted versions of the 30,000 pages already made public.
Trump said that all the information in the redacted documents will be withheld from the public until no later than April 26 of next year, and that agencies will have to propose any further postponements by March 12.
The president’s announcement on Thursday partially made good on a 1992 law that ordered the publication of the assassination files, setting a 25-year deadline that ran out on Thursday.
The law established the Assassination Records Review Board, which has compiled the JFK collection at the National Archives. It also left wiggle room, though, for the president to block the release of some documents, an option Trump partially exercised. While many of the documents released Thursday were created in the 1960s and 70s, a small number of them — mostly sourced from the CIA — are as recent as from the 1990s. Such documents could have the potential to expose relatively recent intelligence and law enforcement operations.
The CIA said Thursday they “welcome” the president’s decision to withhold the release of certain documents, stressing that the continued review was necessary to protect intelligence sources and officials.
“CIA’s current redactions were undertaken with the intent to protect information in the collection whose disclosure would harm national security — including the names of CIA assets and current and former CIA officers, as well as specific intelligence methods and partnerships that remain viable to protecting the nation today,” a spokesperson for the agency said in a statement.
The agency highlighted that of the over 87,000 CIA records identified by the 1992 law as pertaining to the case, 69,000 have already been made accessible to the public, and that those that were still redacted make up only less than one percent of the total information they’d collected.
Following the White House’s rollout, researchers expressed skepticism that the CIA and FBI didn’t have enough time to fully review the files for any information that might still risk revealing intelligence sources and methods.
“I guess nobody had 25 years to prepare for today,” said Rex Bradford, president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, a nonprofit research organization that has digitized hundreds of thousands of documents and government reports about the Kennedy assassination.
Stuart Wexler, a high school history teacher in New Jersey and recognized authority on the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., expressed disappointment in the delay in some JFK records.
“This morning I cut all my lessons short to explain the document release and how, while smoking guns are unlikely, a more complete documentary record allows careful historians to piece together answers that fill in important historical gaps,” he said. “Tomorrow my students will ask me why the U.S. government needs to withhold information 50 years after the fact, and I will not have a satisfactory answer.”
“This is a fiasco,” said John McAdams, a political science professor at Marquette University and JFK researcher. “These issues should have been resolve weeks, if not months, ago.”
McAdams also said the decision to delay the release of large portions of the records is also a sign of how difficult it is for the unconventional Trump to follow through on some of his promises to buck the system.
“One thing to remember about Trump is that his off-the-top-of-the head popping off is often unconventional or even outrageous, but over time — presumably under the influence of staff or Washington insider – he becomes more conventional,” he said. “Conventional in this case would involve listening to intelligence agencies and giving them what they want.”
But an NSC official who spoke on background defended the partial release: “There does remain sensitive information in the records,” he said.
“This reflects poorly on the Trump Administration and confirms everyone’s worst fears about government in general,” said Russ Baker, an investigative journalist and founder of
WhoWhatWhy.com , a new site that has established a team to pore over the documents that are released.
“Whatever combination of incompetence and self-interest, it is highly demoralizing,” he added. “The only possible mitigating factor is budget cuts at agencies, and a lack of adequate personnel to handle these tasks — and again blame falls on the Trump Admin and its GOP allies.”
The trove of documents released Thursday still offered fresh information on the Kennedy assassination, an event that has been the intense focus of historians and conspiracy theorists for decades. Trump himself has not shied away from offering his own theories on the assassination, including linking Rafael Cruz, the father of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), to Kennedy’s murder. Trump offered no evidence to support the accusation, which both Cruzes have denied.
The released documents also included a slew of files related to the late Martin Luther King Jr., a well-known target of the FBI. One such file, the beginning of which is heavily redacted, includes pages dated from May 18-19, 1966 appearing to list 18 names and phone numbers of persons involved in phone calls to and from King. Included as well are receipts from December, 1965 from a men’s clothing store at the Miami International Airport, and credit charges via the Diner’s Club at a Sheraton Hotel in Chicago.
Trump has willingly waded into other conspiracy theories as well, serving most notably as one of the loudest voices behind the so-called “birther” movement that accused former President Barack Obama of having been born in another country. The release of Obama’s Hawaiian birth certificate did little to assuage the baseless theories pushed by Trump and others, and the president only conceded that Obama had been born in the U.S. in the weeks leading up to the 2016 election, claiming credit for having gotten to the bottom of the former president’s place of birth.
But the White House said Thursday’s decision to only partially release of the documents, which relate to the details of a historic event cemented in the American psyche, was still consistent with a desire for transparency .
“The president wants to ensure there is full transparency here,” a White House official said. “And [he] is expecting that the agencies do a better job in reducing the conflicts in the redactions. … That’s what’s been conveyed to all the agencies.”
Akela Lacy contributed to this report.
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