It’s amazing what the new leadership of the FBI can help uncover…
The FBI announced Tuesday that it has discovered 2,400 new documents related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, part of an effort to comply with a recent order from former President Donald Trump that mandates the release of thousands of files, according to the AP .
These documents will be transferred to the National Archives for declassification.
While more than 5 million pages of JFK-related records have been released, approximately 3,000 files remain partially or completely unreleased. The FBI did not disclose the contents of the newly found documents, but credited its 2020 launch of a central records complex and improved inventory technology for speeding up the discovery process.
Jefferson Morley , vice president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation and editor of the blog JFK Facts , praised the disclosure as “refreshingly candid.” “It shows that the FBI is seriously transparent,” Morley added, noting that it sets a precedent for other agencies to release undisclosed documents.
The development follows a recent order from former President Donald Trump directing the director of national intelligence and the attorney general to develop a plan to declassify related files. A spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence confirmed that a plan had been submitted but did not provide details or a timeline.
The AP report says that while all the assassination records were supposed to be public by 2017, presidential waivers delayed full disclosure. Trump initially promised to release all the documents but kept some under wraps due to national security concerns. The Biden administration has continued to gradually release them, though some files remain classified.
Conspiracy theories have surrounded the Kennedy assassination in Dallas in 1963, when Lee Harvey Oswald shot the president from a Texas school library. Two days later, nightclub owner Jack Ruby killed Oswald while he was being transferred from prison. The Warren Commission concluded that Oswald acted alone, but skepticism has persisted.
Gerald Posner, author of Case Closed, which supports the lone shooter theory, argued that the new files could be duplicates. “If these are indeed new murder documents, it raises a whole bunch of questions about how they got missed all these years,” he said, adding that it would be “wow” if they were related to Oswald or the investigation.
Previous releases of the documents detail intelligence operations at the time, including CIA memos about Oswald’s visits to the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico in the weeks before the assassination. Morley stressed that the CIA’s surveillance of Oswald has been “an emerging story over the last five to ten years,” speculating that the new files could shed more light on it.
