The Biden Admin released 1,500 previously classified documents while keeping 10,000 censored, thereby JFK frustrating researchers.
QUICK FACTS:
- In 1992, Congress passed a law that mandated the eventual release of all government records concerning the President John F. Kennedy assassination.
- At that time, the legislature found that “most of the records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy are almost 30 years old, and only in the rarest cases is there any legitimate need for continued protection of such records.”
- After repeated delays over decades, an October Memorandum from the Biden administration detailed the parameters for full and final disclosure.
- Pursuant to the Biden memo, the National Archives released 1,491 documents on Dec. 15.
RESEARCHERS FRUSTRATED BY LACK OF TRANSPARENCY:
- The Dec. 15 release leaves more than 10,000 documents redacted or withheld. Pursuant to the terms of the Biden memo, these still-censored documents will not reach the public until December of 2022 at the earliest.
- As CNN reported, this latest delay prolongs the debate between the government and JFK researchers, who argue that “the CIA, the FBI, and other national security agencies have continually stonewalled a congressionally mandated release.”
- “It’s always ‘the next time,'” said the University of Virginia’s Larry Sabato, a leading JFK assassination scholar. He called the redactions that were removed from the documents released on the 15th “minimal and worthless.”
- Sabato added “The reason it’s so important is not so much that we’re going to find a smoking gun that changes the entire theory of who killed Kennedy. The lack of transparency and the fact that getting these documents after 58 years is like pulling a whole mouthful of teeth—it tells you why we have so many conspiracy theories.”
- A government official familiar with the classifications told CNN that “[b]ecause it has taken [the government] so long to get these records out, no matter what comes out, no one is going to believe that that’s it.”
- Conservative commentator Candace Owens tweeted a similar yet distinct take on the matter:
THE DEC. 15 DECLASSIFICATION:
- CNN reported that “[l]ongtime JFK researchers say the release likely does not include a smoking gun that would substantively change the public understanding of the circumstances surrounding Kennedy’s death—nor, historians argue, does one likely exist elsewhere.”
- Meanwhile, FOX News said that “many of the newly released documents concern Kennedy’s [alleged] assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, as well as tensions between the U.S. and Cuba.”
- According to the National Archives, more than ninety percent of JFK records are now available to the public, most of them tax records.
