Washington — The Trump administration on Tuesday evening released tens of thousands of pages of government documents related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, weeks after President Trump ordered government agencies to make their JFK files public.
The documents were uploaded by the National Archives and Records Administration, the agency responsible for housing the government’s collection of records related to the assassination. The Archives said Tuesday that “all records previously withheld for classification” have been released, but not all are available online yet.
Shortly after taking office in January, the president took executive action to establish a process to declassify and release any remaining documents related to Kennedy’s killing, as well as the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. The order instructed the director of national intelligence and attorney general to present the president with a plan for the “full and complete release of records relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.”
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.
What’s in the newly released JFK files?
Mr. Trump estimated the new files contain roughly 80,000 pages. CBS News has a team of reporters sifting through the records to identify what documents contain new information.
Many of the records were expected to be unredacted versions of documents that have been released but partially obscured in the past.
Researchers have estimated there are about 3,000 records related to the case that hadn’t been previously released in full. There are 1,123 documents of varying lengths in Tuesday’s online release.
Various investigations into the JFK assassination over the years — some as recently as the 1990s — swept up classified information that dealt with intelligence gathering methods and friendly foreign governments but were not directly linked to the assassination. Portions of documents, and some entire records, had remained classified for decades to protect sources and methods.
David Barrett, a professor of political science at Villanova University who studies the Kennedy presidency, was examining the documents on Tuesday evening. He told CBS News that “non-scholars who dive into these documents are going to be baffled as to what most of them have to do with the Kennedy or other assassinations.” For scholars like him, however, he said it is “certainly the most useful release of documents that has occurred because of the redactions being removed.”
“Now I know who or what is being referred to. So a memorandum on CIA relations with the Miami newspapers, for example, and details on three CIA officers doing technical collection of intelligence in Cuba — I’ve never really had those details before,” he said.
Before the release, Barrett said he didn’t expect “earth-shaking information, either with regard to the assassination or more broadly.” “But, you know, you never know,” he added.
Larry Sabato, the director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics and author of “The Kennedy Half-Century,” told the Associated Press that his team is going through the released files in search of a “long, long list” of sensitive documents that were previously heavily redacted. He believes some of those passages may concern Cuba or “what the CIA did or didn’t do relevant to Lee Harvey Oswald,” Kennedy’s assassin.
Where to read the new JFK assassination files
The documents have been uploaded to a portal maintained by the National Archives, which can be found here. The Archives maintains the government’s trove of records known as the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection.
Not all of the files are available online yet, however. Some are available “in person, via hard copy or on analog media formats” at the National Archives at College Park, Maryland. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence said the records that are only available in person are being digitized and will be uploaded to the Archives in the coming days. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard will post updates on social media, and the records will also be on the White House website.
Additional documents remain under court seal, including some for reasons of grand jury secrecy. Other IRS-related documents must be unsealed before release, and the Archives and Justice Department are working on making these available.
According to the Mary Ferrell Foundation, a nonprofit that compiles historical government records about the JFK assassination and other events, roughly 3,500 documents in the official collection contained redactions before the latest release. About 75% of those records were produced by the CIA. More than 500 other records were withheld from public release entirely.
The Mary Ferrell Foundation runs its own JFK documents repository on its website, which has deeper search functions for exploring the trove of records. The group typically adds new documents shortly after they are released by the Archives.
Why did Trump release these JFK files?
Mr. Trump campaigned on declassifying and releasing records related to the JFK assassination, in part due to his political alliance with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has long called for more transparency about the assassinations that killed his uncle and father.
In 1992, Congress passed a law requiring the government to release all of its records about the assassination by October 2017, while giving the president the authority to withhold records for national security reasons. In his first term, Mr. Trump unveiled thousands of documents, but some of their contents were kept under wraps after lobbying by the CIA and FBI. Other records were withheld altogether.
Over the course of 2021 and 2022, President Biden likewise released thousands of records but kept key portions redacted, frustrating researchers and observers who had called for their full release for years.
When was JFK assassinated?
Kennedy was shot in the head on Nov. 22, 1963, at the age of 46 while riding in a convertible in Dallas, Texas. Oswald, a former Marine and communist activist who had lived in the Soviet Union, was soon arrested for the killing. But Oswald was also shot and killed in the basement of the Dallas police headquarters two days later.
An investigation led by Chief Justice Earl Warren concluded that Oswald acted alone in shooting Kennedy, but the probe has been widely criticized by academics and historians in the 62 years since the assassination.
Oswald had been on the government’s radar before the assassination. He defected to the Soviet Union in 1959, and returned to the U.S. in 1962. A self-described Marxist, he worked with a pro-Fidel Castro activist group and had contact with Soviet and Cuban consulates in the months leading up to Kennedy’s death.
In October 1963, the CIA intercepted a phone call he made to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City, though the full implications of the conversation remain unclear. Some additional documents related to that wiretap operation were released in 2022.
Longtime JFK watchers have hoped that the documents that have been redacted or withheld by the government would reveal more information about Oswald’s activities in Mexico City and what else federal agencies knew about him before the shooting.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
and
contributed to this report.
