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The National Archives announced Friday the release of additional documents related to the assassination of the president John F. Kennedy in 1963 and said that by doing so they were operating pursuant to a memorandum from the President Joe Biden.
Biden’s memo certified that the archivist completed the review in May and affirmed that the remaining documents authorized to be declassified had been made public, meeting a previously set deadline of June 30.
The delivery of new information meets President Biden’s deadline of June 30 and includes thousands of pre-written documents. A breakdown of the documents being published and the documents themselves can be seen here.
President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963. An investigation concluded that the assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, had acted alone. But historians have long questioned the investigation and have hoped that the archived documents could reveal more about Oswald’s actions.
“At the National Archives, we believe in the importance of government transparency and information accessibility,” archivist Colleen Shogan said in a statement.
“The dedicated and detailed work done by NARA staff and by our partners and concerned agencies is an excellent representation of how we can collaborate together to ensure that the maximum amount of information is available to the American people, while protecting what we owe,” Shōgan added.
This action reflects the instructions [del presidente Biden] that all information related to the assassination of President Kennedy should be released, except where the strongest reasons indicate otherwise,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Friday.
Photo: Getty Images
Delays in publishing the files
In 1992, Congress passed the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, prompted in part by the furor caused by Oliver Stone’s conspiracy film “JFK.”
The law dictated that all murder records must be released publicly by October 2017, but former President Donald Trump and Biden allowed multiple postponements on the advice of the FBI, CIA and other national security agencies, according to CNN.
Trump eventually released tens of thousands of documents, most of which include at least some redaction.
By December 2022, Biden had released more than 14,000 additional documents related to the JFK assassination, at which point he ordered the archivist and relevant agencies to conduct a six-month review of the remaining records. More than 2,600 documents have been published since then, with 1,103 documents published as of Tuesday.
Kennedy’s assassination prompted questions from the public and researchers, many conspiracy theories, and government secrecy. Each time files have been published, the documents have been reviewed to make sure there are no new leads to the assassination or new pieces of historical information about CIA and FBI operations in the 1960s.
Keep reading:
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– Biden ordered the declassification of documents on the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy
– Robert Kennedy Jr., nephew of former President JFK and anti-vaccine activist, is running in the 2024 election