Next week, thousands of documents revolving around the JFK assassination are expected to be released, documents that the CIA and FBI have fought to keep secret.
The National Archives and Records Administration has been arguing with the CIA and FBI for years, asserting that the agencies were ignoring the 1992 John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act that was designed to release all the documents.
According to POLITICO, correspondence between the National Archives and Records Administration and other agencies revealed that the CIA and FBI wanted the documents secret because intelligence and law-enforcement informants from the era of the assassination who are still alive could be at risk by being publicly identified.
New York attorney Larry Schnapf filed a federal lawsuit in October against President Biden and the National Archives in which he demanded the release of the remaining assassination documents. He obtained the correspondence between the Archives and the other agencies with a Freedom of Information Act request.
One of Schnapf’s clients, Jefferson Morley, the Vice President of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, said he thought 44 of the unreleased documents mention a covert CIA program involving Cuba and Lee Harvey Oswald, who has historically been acknowledged as Kennedy’s assassin.
“What are they hiding? There’s 44 documents that we know exist, that are assassination-related but have not been released. And they relate to covert programs in which George Joannides was involved,” Morley said, referring to a man who guided an anti-Fidel Castro group and came into contact with Oswald when he was connected to a pro-Castro group. “There was authorized operational activity around Oswald before the assassination. And that’s what’s in these withheld documents.”
The 1992 John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act catalyzed the release of files that suggested the CIA’s Mexico City station had surveilled Oswald when he visited Mexico City several weeks before the assassination and boasted he would kill Kennedy.
POLITICO contended that documents point to the fact that the failure of the CIA station in Mexico to act with more speed when they surveilled Oswald in September and October 1963 prevented them from possibly stopping the assassination.
A recent NBC News poll found that over 70% of voters wanted President Biden to order the rest of the JFK assassination records released on December 15.
“There’s not a lot that unites a lot of American voters these days, but one of the few things that does is to see President Biden release the long-overdue JFK files as he promised a year ago,” Democratic pollster Fernand Amandi stated.