The decades-long wait for the release of the government’s secret files on President John F. Kennedy’s assassination may be coming to an end, according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), which has delivered a plan to make the documents public to the White House under President Trump’s order.
“In accordance with the President’s executive order, ODNI submitted its plan to the White House,” a spokeswoman for the office told AWN Friday afternoon.
However, it is uncertain how soon thousands of assassination-related documents will be disclosed. The president’s executive order signed last month simply mandated the submission of a plan by Friday’s deadline “for the full and complete release of records relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.”
Researchers and authors have voiced confidence that Trump will push a national security establishment that has traditionally relied on secrecy and dragged its skates on such requests from others to act quickly. However, many remain skeptical that any sensitive data will be quickly unredacted by officials from the CIA, FBI, and other agencies.
“They face harder choices than Trump knew when he made this breezy proclamation,” author Jefferson Morley, creator of the website jfkfacts.org, told AWN on Friday. “How serious [Trump] was is going to be tested.”
Morley and other experts are particularly interested in obtaining unrestricted access to CIA papers relating to the spy agency’s past monitoring of Kennedy killer Lee Harvey Oswald. The CIA originally launched an investigation on Oswald when he attempted to defect to the Soviet Union in 1959. In the months leading up to the killing, the CIA traced his journey to Mexico City, where he sought to secure a visa to fly to Cuba.
“If the Trump order is seriously implemented, we would get those files,” Morley told reporters.
Congress decided in 1992 to declassify all of the government’s assassination-related papers by 2017, a date that presidents Trump and Biden have repeatedly delayed in response to national security concerns. They maintained that ongoing classification was required to safeguard the identity of agency workers, intelligence assets, sources, and methods still used by US spies, as well as “still-classified covert action programs still in effect,” according to a December 2022 CIA report to the White House.
President Trump issued an order on January 23 stating that redactions are no longer “consistent with the public interest” and that “the release of these records is long overdue.”
In the same order, Trump sought a plan for the release of secret materials relating to the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, with an early March deadline.
The National Archives, which is in charge of the assassination-related materials, said in a statement to AWN Friday that it “looks forward to implementing the President’s direction in partnership with our agency partners.”
