JFK hearing revives cover-up talk; Geraldo, Ross Coulthart respond
(NewsNation) — A House panel hearing last week featured testimony calling into question the official explanation that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963.
Geraldo Rivera and Ross Coulthart, two journalists who appear regularly on NewsNation, offer their take on whether there is cause for concern or whether skeptics are going down the same dead end.
Wednesday's hearing of the Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets was the second devoted to the opaqueness surrounding Kennedy's death.
Declassified: The JFK Assassination
At the meeting, witnesses to the assassination or its immediate aftermath expressed doubts about the Warren Commission's conclusion, and lawmakers heard allegations about tainted medical files, fake X-rays and lost bullet fragments.
Media veteran Rivera, a NewsNation correspondent-at-large, said it's simple enough for him: Oswald, an ex-Marine sharpshooter with an ax to grind, acted alone.
'Lee Harvey Oswald was a low-down, dirty communist,' he said. 'The only thing in his life he ever did well was the assassination. He was a marksman. He was a sharpshooter.'
Rivera insists that if there were a viable alternative explanation, it would have surfaced long ago.
'If it had been something other than the Warren Commission finding — that Lee Harvey Oswald and Lee Harvey Oswald alone killed John Kennedy — we would know it by now,' he said. 'I am unconvinced by all this recent testimony. And it always seems to me that the congresspeople involved are always the most eager to get on TV, and they make news by outrageous or outlandish or unprovable claims.'
Witnesses accuse CIA of obstructing JFK investigations
Coulthart, host of the 'Reality Check' podcast, said the case is worth re-examining. He said he was intrigued by last week's testimony, including remarks from a surgeon at Parkland Memorial Hospital who received the mortally wounded Kennedy.
Coulthart noted the physician said the president's wounds appeared as if they came from the front of Kennedy, not from behind, where Oswald was believed to be in the Texas Book Depository.
'I just think the media is locked into a cycle of denial, that it's such an incomprehensible thing to contemplate the possibility that a president was killed in a coup d'état in 1963, and that's what we're talking about,' Coulthart told 'NewsNation Prime' on Saturday.
Coulthart said the CIA may still be withholding certain files in the Kennedy assassination.
Earlier this year, the Trump administration ordered the release of thousands of documents on Kennedy's death, but many observers said there was little new information included and no smoking gun that would solidify a different premise.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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