Latest news with #AssassinationRecordsCollectionAct
Yahoo
18-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Federal government releases 10,000 documents on Robert F. Kennedy assassination
April 18 (UPI) -- The federal government on Friday released the first tranche of approximately 50,000 pages of classified documents related to the investigation into the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. Friday's release consists of around 10,000 pages of documents that are now available on the National Archives. Last month, President Donald Trump's administration released approximately 80,000 documents related to the November 22, 1963, assassination of former President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas. After taking office in January, Trump signed an executive order to release tens of thousands of classified documents related to the assassinations of both Kennedy brothers and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard's department was charged with collecting and digitizing the unredacted documents, which have been stored in several federal facilities. "The DIG partnered with The National Archives and other agency officials to manually scan and upload over 10,000 pages, for online viewing by the American people, to fulfill President Trump's maximum transparency promise," Gabbard said in a statement on her department's website. Further documents related to the Robert F. Kennedy assassination will be made public once they are processed. Kennedy's son, current U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., applauded the news. "Lifting the veil on the RFK papers is a necessary step toward restoring trust in American government," Kennedy, Jr. said in the DIG statement. "I commend President Trump for his courage and his commitment to transparency. I'm grateful also to Tulsi Gabbard for her dogged efforts to root out and declassify these documents." Hardly any of the documents related to King's April 4, 1968, assassination in Memphis, Tenn., and Robert F. Kennedy's death in Los Angeles had been catalogued, scanned and digitized, instead sitting in boxes in federal warehouses in different locations. A large number of files related to John F. Kennedy's assassination were identified and ordered released following the federal government's passing of The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. The Act mandated the release of the JFK records, many of which carry heavy redactions. Trump has ordered their unredacted release and Gabbard on Friday applauded the president's pledge to adhere to "maximum transparency" in all three cases. "Nearly 60 years after the tragic assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, the American people will, for the first time, have the opportunity to review the federal government's investigation thanks to the leadership of President Trump. My team is honored that the President entrusted us to lead the declassification efforts and to shine a long-overdue light on the truth. I extend my deepest thanks for Bobby Kennedy and his families' support," Gabbard said in Friday's statement. Robert F. Kennedy was shot while celebrating a victory in the California presidential primary at a Los Angeles hotel. A 12-member jury in 1969 found Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian-Jordanian national, guilty of murder and sentenced him to death. His sentence was commuted to life in prison and the now 81-year-old remains incarcerated at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in California. Despite the conviction, the circumstances around Kennedy's death in a crowd have sparked conspiracy theories that Sirhan did not pull the trigger, leading to ongoing calls to declassify government records related to the assassination and subsequent investigations.
Boston Globe
22-03-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
Were the Kennedy files a bust? Not so fast, historians say.
It was just one paragraph in the roughly 77,000 pages the National Archives posted online this past week as part of the latest -- and supposedly final -- release of its vast collection of documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up But for some of the scholars who immediately started combing through the documents, the brief passage, seen unredacted for the first time, raised eyebrows for sure. Advertisement 'This opens a door on a whole history of collaboration between the Vatican and the CIA, which, boy, would be explosive if we could get documents about,' said Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst at the National Security Archive, an independent research center at George Washington University. 'Which of course,' he added, 'we will now try to do.' The document drop may have been a disappointment for those hoping for juicy revelations about the Kennedy assassination. But for scholars steeped in the history of intelligence agencies and the secret side of American foreign policy, there have been revelations aplenty. They include information about CIA involvement in various attempted coups, election interference in countries around the world and connections that ran to the top of some foreign governments. To see the documents all drop suddenly, without redactions, was remarkable to scholars. 'I didn't think I'd live to see it,' Kornbluh said. That the release included so much material with no obvious connection to the assassination reflected the broad intentions of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, a 1992 law passed after the Oliver Stone film 'JFK' prompted a resurgence of conspiracy theorizing. Advertisement The law ordered that all government records related to the assassination and various investigations be gathered in one place and released within 25 years, with some exceptions for grand jury secrecy, tax privacy and concern for 'identifiable harm' to national security. And the law defined 'assassination-related record' broadly, taking in a swath of documents related to the inner workings and covert operations of the CIA and FBI, including many gathered by the Senate's Church Committee, established in 1975 to investigate abuses by the intelligence agencies. Before this past week, 99% of the roughly 6 million pages in the collection had already been made public. Only several thousand documents remained redacted, and as few as 50 withheld in full, according to past statements from the archives. Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, said this past week that only a few documents, which remained under a court seal because of grand jury rules, were still secret. The federal government is working to get those documents unsealed. The release of the newly unredacted material had long been opposed by the CIA because it would give up the names of its sources. But equally important to the agency was the desire to protect its mid-20th-century tradecraft: how well it had penetrated the Egyptian government's communications, or the depth of its contacts in France. Unredacted passages in the new documents revealed how the CIA wiretapped phones in Mexico City in 1962. While that may be interesting in a Cold War spy movie kind of way, it has no bearing on whether American spy agencies can listen to a phone call made on an encrypted app on a modern cellphone. Advertisement But for historians, the agency's closely guarded 'sources and methods' are important to filling out the full historical picture. And some of the new material is startling, they said. Fredrik Logevall, a Harvard historian who is working on a multivolume biography of Kennedy, said that it was remarkable to see a full version of an unredacted 1961 memo by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., an aide to Kennedy, written shortly after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, warning of the growing power of the CIA and calling for it to be reorganized. Newly visible passages revealed, among other things, that nearly half of the political officers in American embassies around the world were working for the CIA. 'That's astonishing,' Logevall said. He also cited a now-unredacted 41-page memo of minutes from meetings between 1962 and 1963 of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, which included many suggestive new details, including some related to surveillance of China's efforts to develop a nuclear bomb. There was also an unredacted 1967 report by the CIA's inspector general on the 1961 assassination of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo that now shows the names of all the CIA agents involved in the plot. 'Without the 1992 law, all of this probably would have been under lock and key forever,' Logevall said. The revelation of sources' identities causes the CIA deep angst, on principle and because it undermines efforts to recruit sources today. 'These relationships are secret for a reason,' said Nicholas Dujmovic, a retired CIA historian. 'If people don't want others to know that they were cooperating with the CIA, for whatever reason, we have a moral obligation to keep these relationships secret, because that was the going in agreement.' Advertisement Arturo Jimenez-Bacardi, a historian at the University of South Florida and researcher for the National Security Archive, said the documents also revealed efforts to interfere in elections in Finland, Peru and Somalia that had been rumored but undocumented, or entirely unknown. There was also new information, he said, about CIA involvement in failed and successful coups in various countries, including Brazil, Haiti and what is now Guyana. A 1964 CIA inspector general report on the workings of the agency's station in Mexico City was particularly significant, he said, because it contained one of the most detailed accounts available of how the agency organized its ground operations. A heavily redacted version was released in 2022. But newly visible passages revealed that Adolfo López Mateos, the president of Mexico, had approved a joint surveillance operation against Soviets in Mexico. The memo also described a 'highly successful project' aimed at 'rural and peasant targets,' led by a Catholic priest who had created an extensive network of youth groups, credit unions, agricultural co-ops and study centers -- presumably, Jimenez-Bacardi said, to make sure people 'don't go on the Soviet path.' The White House said Thursday that all remaining classified documents in the collection are now open for research at the National Archives, with additional pages still set to be digitized and posted online 'in the coming days.' Jimenez-Bacardi said he was eager to see the Church Committee interviews and depositions of former directors of the CIA, but had not yet found them. Parts were included in previous releases. 'But there are still secrets in those depositions,' he said. Advertisement This article originally appeared in
Yahoo
19-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Donald Trump Releases 80,000 Sealed Documents on JFK Assassination
Originally appeared on E! Online Previously classified documents pertaining to late President 's 1963 assassination have been released. More than 60 years after JFK's fatal shooting, which federal authorities concluded was solely perpetrated by Lee Harvey Oswald, the government began publishing 80,000 pages of unredacted records relating to their investigation at the direction of President Donald Trump. Trump signed an executive order in January to release all records about the assassination, as well as the 1968 killings of the 46-year-old's brother Robert F. Kennedy Sr. and civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. "I have now determined that the continued redaction and withholding of information from records pertaining to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy is not consistent with the public interest," Trump stated in his order, "and the release of these records is long overdue." The documents are available in digitized form on the National Archives website and on analog media formats at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) offices in Maryland. More from E! Online Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams Return to Earth After Being Stuck in Space for 9 Months Why Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams Were Carried Out on Stretchers After Landing on Earth Firefighter Arrested for Allegedly Leaking Photos From Georgia Twin Brothers' Apparent Murder-Suicide However, this is not the first time classified records about JFK's assassination have been released. NARA has been making JFK materials available to the public in batches since 1992, when Congress passed the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act to unseal investigation documents. According to the agency, the last batch to drop was in 2023 under then-President Joe Biden's directive. "At the National Archives, we believe in the importance of government transparency and the accessibility of information," archivist Dr. Colleen Shogan said in a statement at the time. "The dedicated and detailed work completed by NARA staff and by our partners and stakeholder agencies is an excellent representation of how we can collaborate together to ensure that the maximum amount of information is made available to the American people, while we protect what we must." For a complete guide on the Kennedys, keep reading. Joseph P. Kennedy and Rose Kennedy Joseph P. Kennedy F. KennedyCaroline KennedyJohn F. Kennedy KennedyKathleen "Kick" KennedyEunice Kennedy ShriverRobert F. KennedyRobert F. Kennedy F. Kennedy IIIKick KennedyConor KennedyKyra Kennedy Modern FamilyKerry KennedyEdward "Ted" Kennedy For the latest breaking news updates, click here to download the E! News App
Yahoo
18-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump to release 80,000 pages of unredacted JFK files on Tuesday. Here's why
After signing an executive order last January, President Donald Trump is expected to release 80,000 pages of unredacted files Tuesday about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The executive order will also publicize the federal government documents concerning the assassinations of former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. Here's what we know about the release of the JFK files. The release of the JFK files was a campaign promise during Trump's presidential run last year. "People have been waiting for decades for this," Trump said, announcing the upcoming release of the Kennedy files during a Monday visit to the John F. Kennedy Center of the Performing Arts, which he's taken over as board chairman. "We have a tremendous amount of paper. You've got a lot of reading. I don't believe we're going to redact anything," Trump said. John F. Kennedy was shot and killed on Nov. 22, 1963, while riding in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas. His assassination has long been the subject of conspiracies after Lee Harvey Oswald, the Marine veteran identified as Kennedy's assassin, was shot and killed days later. While millions of government records related to the Kennedy assassination have been previously released, some information remains classified and redacted. Trump said he instructed his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, to oversee the release of the remaining files. In 1992, Congress passed the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, mandating that all materials related to the assassination be preserved in a unified collection within the National Archives and made accessible to the public. The law allowed federal agencies 25 years to review and release the documents, with certain exceptions. This collection at the National Archives comprises over 5 million pages of records. According to the National Archives, the John F. Kennedy assignation documents will be available on their website on a rolling basis. — USA TODAY Network White House correspondent Joey Garrison contributed to this report. This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Trump set to release 80,000 pages of unredacted JFK files Tuesday
CBS News
18-03-2025
- Politics
- CBS News
JFK assassination files to be released today, Trump says
President Trump announced that tens of thousands of pages of the JFK assassination files would be released to the public Tuesday. "People have been waiting decades for this," the president said of the release of files related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Mr. Trump, who was speaking at the Kennedy Center Monday, added that he didn't believe the material, "approximately 80,000 pages," would be redacted. "I said during the campaign that I'd do it, and I'm a man of my word," the president said of the impending release. Last month, the FBI said it had discovered roughly 2,400 records related to the assassination during a search stemming from Mr. Trump's executive action ordering files related to the 1963 killing to be declassified. The bureau said that the documents, which have been inventoried and digitized, "were previously unrecognized as related to the JFK assassination case file." The FBI in February was transferring the records to the National Archives and Records Administration to be included in the ongoing declassification process that has been ongoing. The bureau did not say what the records contain. In his first week in office, Mr. Trump signed an executive order that called for the declassification of these files and also those related to the assassinations of his brother Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. The order gave the director of national intelligence and attorney general 15 days to present a plan to the president for the "full and complete release of records" related to Kennedy's assassination. Congress in 1992 enacted the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, which required all assassination-related material be kept in a single collection within the National Archives and be publicly released. The law gave federal agencies 25 years to process and disclose the documents, with exceptions. The collection at the National Archives consists of more than 5 million pages of records. The National Archives has over the last three decades made material related to Kennedy's assassination available to the public, with the latest batch disclosed in August 2023. The agency said in December 2022 that more than 97% of records in its Kennedy collection are available to the American people.
