President Joe Biden allowed the release of documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, but ordered that some remain secret for now.
The National Archives posted 13,173 documents, a slight increase over the initial 12,879 documents due to last-minute additions, containing never-before-seen information to its website on Thursday, which was the deadline set by Biden following a redactions process.
“The John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection (the Collection), established by the National Archives in November 1992, consists of approximately five million pages,” the National Archives said in a press release. “The vast majority of the collection has been publicly available without restrictions on access since the late 1990s. Following today’s release, over 97% of records in the collection are now available.”
At the behest of some agencies and the acting archivist of the United States, citing “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,” Biden ordered that certain records will remain hidden from the public until at least June 30, 2023.
His White House memo added: “Any information that agencies propose for continued postponement of public release beyond June 30, 2023, shall be limited to the absolute minimum under the statutory standard.”
Kennedy was assassinated at the age of 46 on November 22, 1963, in Dallas. Soon after, Lee Harvey Oswald, a former Marine and onetime defector to the Soviet Union, was arrested and charged with the killings of Kennedy and Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit.
Although Oswald denied killing Kennedy and claimed he was a “patsy,” he was never tried — Oswald was shot dead at the age of 24 on national television at the Dallas Police headquarters by nightclub owner Jack Ruby.
The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 was signed into law by former President George H.W. Bush, and there have been multiple delays in document disclosures ever since that time, giving room for conspiracy theories about Kennedy’s death to linger nearly 60 years later.
After former President Donald Trump pushed back the full release during his tenure, Biden followed suit in 2021 by directing an interim release in December of that year and one more comprehensive release by Thursday.
“Pursuant to my direction, agencies have undertaken a comprehensive effort to review the full set of almost 16,000 records that had previously been released in redacted form and determined that more than 70 percent of those records may now be released in full,” Biden said in his memo Thursday. “This significant disclosure reflects my Administration’s commitment to transparency and will provide the American public with greater insight and understanding of the Government’s investigation into this tragic event in American history.”
More than seven in 10 voters want the records released, according to the results of a poll released this month.
The findings from Fernand Amandi, a Democratic pollster and JFK assassination history expert, were released at an event in Washington where investigators raised hopes for the disclosure of a “smoking-gun proof of a CIA operation” involving Oswald, even though the federal government has long claimed Oswald acted alone and was not tied to the CIA. The group spearheading that effort, the Mary Ferrell Foundation, sued Biden and the National Archives in October, accusing the government of failing to implement the 1992 JFK Records Act.