Latest news with #KennedyAssassinationRecordsCollection
Russia Today
19-03-2025
- Politics
- Russia Today
White House releases JFK assassination files
The administration of US President Donald Trump has released thousands of pages of government files related to the assassination of former US President John F. Kennedy (JFK) in Dallas on November 22, 1963. The National Archives uploaded some 63,000 pages of documents on its website in two initial tranches on Tuesday, with more files expected to be publish once they are digitized. 'All records previously withheld for classification that are part of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection are released,' it said. Shortly after taking office on January 20, Trump signed an executive order to declassify government documents related to the assassinations during the 1960s of John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. The shooting of JFK has long been the subject of speculation in the US regarding the alleged role of rogue elements within the government. A poll by Gallup in 2023 suggested that 65% of Americans did not believe the findings of the official investigation, which concluded Lee Harvey Oswald, a former US Marine, acted alone in killing the 35th US president. Among those surveyed, 20% said they believed that Oswald conspired with the US government, while another 16% suggested that the CIA had been involved. Trump told reporters on Monday that 'people have been waiting decades' for the publication of the JFK assassination files. Approximately 80,000 pages of previously classified records would be made available to the public, he added. 'I said during the campaign that I would do it, and I am a man of my word,' the president insisted. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) said in a statement on Tuesday that the records are being released in fulfillment of Trump's promise of 'maximum transparency and a commitment to rebuild the trust of the American people in the Intelligence Community (IC) and federal agencies.' Scholars, historians, and journalists are likely to spend months sifting through the records for new information about Kennedy's killing, with the newly published files being identified only by record numbers and having no descriptions.
Yahoo
19-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
JFK files released: Here's what to know so far about the 80,000 pages
Government files related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy have been released by the Trump administration, and so far it's just a lot to process. In a directive from President Donald Trump, 80,000 pages of unredacted files associated with the widely popular Democratic president were released this week. The release of the unredacted files is part of Trump's day one executive order in January, which aimed at fully releasing government documents related to the assassinations of Kennedy, his brother and presidential candidate Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, D-N.Y., and civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. With that many pages, historians are beginning the slow process of reading and interpreting the pages they, conspiracy theorists and the public have waited decades for. The anticipation of some bombshell reveal in the documents, might just fizzle out though. James Johnston, author of "Murder, Inc.: The CIA under John F. Kennedy" told USA TODAY that he wasn't expecting any bombshells. 'If it was going to embarrass the agency or tell a different story, they wouldn't have turned them over to the National Archives in the first place,' said Johnston, who was a staff member of the congressional Church Committee that investigated the CIA in 1975. 'And if they were withholding them before, I'm guessing they would continue to withhold them.' Historians were quick to say that it would take time to comb through all the documents to see if there were any significant shifts in what has been reported to have happened in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. While it is expected to take some time to go through all of the documents, so far none have revealed any changes to the long-standing findings that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone and was the one to fire the bullet that killed Kennedy, according to reports from USA TODAY. You can find out more about the analysis of the documents so far at The National Archives and Records Administration is the keeper of the documents and have them posted online on their website here. The National Archives posted them Monday night with this statement: 'In accordance with President Donald Trump's directive of March 17, 2025, all records previously withheld for classification that are part of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection are released.' The documents were released just before 7 p.m., but not all the pages are available via the National Archives just yet. 'As the records continue to be digitized, they will be posted to this page,' the National Archives said, suggesting that not all of the documents were being released on Tuesday in digital form. Before being elected to the highest office in the land, Kennedy made several visits to Tennessee as a senator and eventually came back during his presidency in 1963, months before his assassination in Dallas, Texas. Kennedy was well-known for his speeches and spoke on multiple occasions across the Volunteer State, from praising the Tennessee Valley Authority and Oak Ridge's path in nuclear energy to coming for a visit to Vanderbilt just six months before his death. A 2013 article in The Tennessean, looked back on Kennedy's visit and some of the parallels between his Nashville visit and Dallas. The 35th president arrived in Music City in a convertible following a route printed in the paper. Along with his visit, came tension among Tennessee Democrats as Kennedy started to float his ideas for his 1964 re-election campaign. Similar tension was happening amongst Texas Democrats during Kennedy's visit six months later, read the article. "It could have happened that morning (in Nashville), no doubt about it," said John Jay Hooker, an attorney and Kennedy family friend who attended the 35th president's speech at Vanderbilt University's Dudley Field on May 18, 1963. The visit to Tennessee went smoothly despite these factors, no one knew it would be his last visit to the Volunteer state before his assassination on Nov. 22, 1963. "He had the facility to convince you that one man can make a difference and every man should try," Hooker reminisced in the article. "That has been the guiding light of my life." This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: JFK files released: Here's where to read them, historian outlook, more
Yahoo
19-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Government releases latest batch of JFK assassination documents
More than 60 years after President John F. Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas, the federal government on Tuesday began releasing what could be the final trove of documents delving into the assassination that shocked the nation and spawned countless conspiracy theories. The National Archives and Records Administration started posting the long-awaited files just before 7 p.m. — a day after President Donald Trump announced that 80,000 pages related to the fatal shooting on Nov. 22, 1963, were about to be released. 'In accordance with President Donald Trump's directive of March 17, 2025, all records previously withheld for classification that are part of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection are released," the administration's statement read. Within minutes, thousands of documents that had been hidden from the public for decades appeared on the site. It wasn't immediately clear whether the trove of documents contains any bombshells or evidence to counter the conclusion the Warren Commission reached in 1964 that a lone gunman named Lee Harvey Oswald fired the fatal shots from the Texas Schoolbook Depository. 'You got a lot of reading,' Trump said Monday as he visited the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. 'I don't believe we're going to redact anything.' Trump was cagey about what would be in those files. Historians contend that around 4,700 documents haven't yet been released. "The origins of the 80,000 pages of material are unknown," Jefferson Morley, an expert on the JFK assassination and the CIA, wrote on his 'JFK Facts' blog before the new batch of documents was released. Justice Department lawyers worked all night to review hundreds of pages of classified documents before they were released, a person familiar with the matter told NBC News. It also remained to be seen whether the document drop would finally put to rest the widespread public skepticism of the government's official explanation that Oswald acted alone. 'People have so many doubts,' presidential historian Michael Beschloss said. 'There are so many theories that are conflicting. It's very hard for me to imagine that there will be one piece of evidence that will make everyone agree on what happened here. What most people do agree is that the killing of John Kennedy changed history, and mainly in a bad way.' When Trump was campaigning last year and trying to win the endorsement of JFK's nephew Robert F. Kennedy Jr., he renewed his promise to release the files. Hours after he snagged RFK Jr.'s endorsement in August, Trump vowed that if elected, he would establish a commission on assassination attempts in honor of RFK Jr., who is now his secretary of health and human services. Shortly after he began his second term, Trump signed an executive order mandating the release of all records related to President Kennedy's assassination, as well as the 1968 assassinations of RFK Jr.'s father, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy Sr., and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Under the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, all the documents related to the assassination were supposed to have been released by 2017, when Trump was president the first time. Trump released some JFK-related documents then, but he also gave the intelligence agencies more time to assess the remaining files. It wasn't until December 2022 that President Joe Biden released more than 13,000 records after the Mary Ferrell Foundation, the country's largest nonprofit repository of JFK assassination records, sued the administration to make all the documents public. But Biden released only about 98% of all the documents related to the killing that remained in the National Archives, which controls the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection. 'It's high time that the government got its act together and obeyed the spirit and the letter of the law,' Morley, who is also the vice president of the nonpartisan Mary Ferrell Foundation, said at the time. 'This is about our history and our right to know it,' he said. The 4,700 or so records that were kept under wraps were believed to have included more information about accused Oswald's sojourn in Mexico City before the assassination. Among those documents were 44 related to CIA agent George Joannides and a covert Cuba-related program he ran that came into contact with Oswald less than four months before Kennedy was shot, according to calculations made by JFK researchers with the Mary Ferrell Foundation. In a memorandum explaining why some documents weren't being released, Biden noted that the records act 'permits the continued postponement of disclosure of information ... only when postponement remains necessary to protect against an identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or the conduct of foreign relations that is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure.' Prominent historians didn't buy that explanation. 'We're 59 years after President John Kennedy was killed, and there's just no justification for this,' U.S. District Judge John Tunheim, who chaired the Assassination Records Review Board from 1994 to 1998, said when Biden released the records. This article was originally published on
Yahoo
19-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
US releases final trove of secret Kennedy assassination files
The US National Archives on Tuesday released the final batch of files related to the assassination of president John F. Kennedy -- a case that still fuels conspiracy theories more than 60 years after his death. The move follows an executive order issued by President Donald Trump in January directing the unredacted release of the remaining files related to the assassinations of Kennedy, his brother, former attorney general Robert F. Kennedy, and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. "In accordance with President Donald Trump's directive... all records previously withheld for classification that are part of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection are released," the Archives said in a statement on its website Tuesday evening. The National Archives has released millions of pages of records over the past decades relating to the assassination of then-president Kennedy in November 1963, but thousands of documents had been held back at the request of the Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation, citing national security concerns. The Warren Commission that investigated the shooting of the charismatic 46-year-old president determined that it was carried out by a former Marine sharpshooter, Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone. But that formal conclusion has done little to quell speculation that a more sinister plot was behind Kennedy's murder in Dallas, Texas, and the slow release of the government files has added fuel to various conspiracy theories. Kennedy scholars have said the documents that were still held by the archives were unlikely to contain any bombshell revelations or put to rest the rampant conspiracy theories about the assassination of the 35th US president. Oswald was shot by a strip club owner, Jack Ruby, on November 24, 1963 -- two days after the Kennedy assassination -- while being moved to a county jail. Many of the records already released were raw intelligence, including scores of reports from FBI agents following up leads that led nowhere. Much of what they contain was also previously known, such as that the communist-obsessed CIA cooked up several outlandish plots to murder Cuba's Fidel Castro. Oswald defected to the Soviet Union in 1959 but returned to the United States in 1962. Hundreds of books and movies such as the 1991 Oliver Stone film "JFK" have fueled the conspiracy industry, pointing the finger at Cold War rivals the Soviet Union or Cuba, the Mafia and even Kennedy's vice president, Lyndon Johnson. The release of the documents follows an October 26, 1992 act of Congress which required that the unredacted assassination records held in the National Archives be released in full 25 years later. cl/md/dw
Boston Globe
18-03-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
Trump administration releases thousands more pages of JFK assassination records
Advertisement 'In accordance with President Donald Trump's directive of March 17, 2025, all records previously withheld for classification that are part of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection are released,' the National Archives said in a statement on its website. 'As of March 18, 2025, the records are available to access either online at this page or in person, via hard copy or on analog media formats, at the National Archives at College Park, Maryland. As the records continue to be digitized, they will be Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Trump had promised Monday to release about 80,000 pages of documents, but it initially was unclear how many actual pages were in the 1,123 pdfs posted on the site early Tuesday night. The release of the documents comes as Americans continue to doubt the official government determination by the high-level Warren Commission in 1964 that Oswald acted alone in shooting Kennedy as he rode in a convertible in a motorcade through downtown Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. Another investigation more than a decade later by the House Select Committee on Assassinations agreed that Oswald fired the shots that hit Kennedy, but said acoustical evidence showed a 'high probability' a second gunman fired and concluded the murder probably was the result of a conspiracy possibly involving organized crime. Advertisement With the US in the middle of the Cold War, the records involved in both of those investigations were classified, helping fuel conspiracy theories that the Mafia and/or the CIA were behind the assassination. A 2023 Millions of pages of classified documents have been released over the years, including tens of thousands by Trump in his first term and later by Biden. The releases followed a 1992 law that ordered a search for any remaining records, with those found to be transferred to the National Archives and released no more than 25 years later, with an exception for documents with national security concerns. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump's secretary of Health and Human Services, 'In terms of my uncle's death, the evidence is overwhelming the CIA was involved in the murder and then the coverup,' After receiving Kennedy Jr.'s endorsement last year, Trump announced he would order the release of all of the remaining documents about the 1963 presidential assassination 'as a tribute to Bobby.' Trump signed an executive order on Jan. 23 declassifying the remaining files related to President Kennedy's assassination as well as sealed records of the assassinations of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., who also was killed in 1968. Trump asked an aide to give the pen he used to sign the order to RFK Jr. Advertisement The order gave the director of National Intelligence and other officials 15 days to present a plan for release of the John F. Kennedy assassination records and 45 days for the other files. Last month, the FBI said it had found 2,400 new records related to President Kennedy's assassination. But no timeline was issued for the release of the records. Pressure built on the Trump administration to release them from lawmakers such as Representative Anna Paulina Luna, a Florida Republican who was tapped last month to lead a House Oversight Committee Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, and from former Fox News personality Tucker Carlson. Carlson said on his show last Friday that there was 'active pressure' on elected officials to stop the disclosure. 'Who is powerful enough to scare people into slow-walking the disclosure?' Carlson said. 'I think it's very important to get to the bottom of the JFK thing.' On Monday, Trump told reporters he would release approximately 80,000 pages of documents – more than assassination experts expected. 'You've got a lot of reading. I don't believe we're going to redact anything,' Trump said. 'It's going to be very interesting. Jim Puzzanghera can be reached at
