More JFK assassination files set to be released today

Under the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act in 1992, the government was required to release all documents related to the assassination by October 2017, unless doing so would harm national security or intelligence sources. Then-President Donald Trump released thousands of documents over the course of his presidency but withheld others on national security grounds.

In October 2021, President Biden released nearly 1,500 more documents while delaying the release of the most sensitive records until Dec. 15, 2022, saying further review was necessary to “protect against identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or the conduct of foreign relations.”

The Archives said last year that “[a]ny information currently withheld from public disclosure that agencies do not propose for continued postponement” beyond Dec. 15 would be released, leaving open the possibility that federal agencies could seek to further delay the unveiling of some of the outstanding records.

Kennedy was shot and killed while riding in his motorcade through Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, at the age of 46. An investigation led by Chief Justice Earl Warren concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald, a former Marine and communist activist who had lived in the Soviet Union, acted alone, but the probe has been widely criticized by academics and historians in the nearly 60 years since the assassination.

Longtime JFK-watchers hoped that Thursday’s release would shed more light on what the CIA knew about Oswald before Kennedy’s assassination, particularly his activities in Mexico City, where he met with a KGB officer in October 1963. Oswald was shot and killed in the basement of the Dallas police headquarters two days after Kennedy’s assassination, further fueling conspiracy theories about whether he was solely responsible for the killing.

The Mary Ferrell Foundation, a nonprofit group that maintains an online database of records related to the assassination, sued the Biden administration in October, accusing the government of failing to abide by the 2017 deadline for the release of all documents.

“These failures have resulted in confusion, gaps in the records, over-classification, and outright denial of thousands of assassination-related files, five years after the law’s deadline for full disclosure,” the organization said in a statement at the time, asking a judge to compel the documents’ release or establish a more transparent national-security review process under the guidelines set by the 1992 law.