More than 99 percent of the classified documents surrounding the 1963 assassination of the late President John F. Kennedy have been publicly released following the conclusion of a National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) review, according to the White House.
Sharing the news at a June 30 press briefing, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the review’s conclusion demonstrated the Biden administration’s commitment to government transparency and accountability.
“Under President Biden’s leadership, agencies have fully declassified over 16,000 records since 2021,” Jean-Pierre said. “This action reflects his instruction that all information related to President Kennedy’s assassination should be released, except when the strongest possible reasons counsel otherwise.
“As a result, over 99 percent of the records in the collection are now publicly available at the National Archives. In keeping with the president’s direction, the National Archives will be digitizing the entire collection to make it more accessible to the public.”
Biden obliged, certifying the specified information’s continued redaction for the time being and requiring all releasable information to be publicly disclosed by June 30.
‘We Protect What We Must’
The new releases follow Biden’s December 2022 directive that relevant agencies and departments review the remaining redactions in the collection and disclose all information “except when the strongest possible reasons counsel otherwise.”Entities that sought the postponement of certain disclosures included the CIA, FBI, State Department, Defense Department, and NARA itself.
‘What Are They Hiding?’
But not everyone shares Shogan’s confidence.Among those harboring doubts is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nephew of the late 35th president.
“The assassination was 60 years ago,” he added in another post. “What national security secrets could possibly be at risk? What are they hiding?”
That date came and went on Oct. 26, 2017. However, the law does include an exception in instances where the president certifies that a continued delay is “made necessary by an identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations” and the harm is “of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest.”
But Kennedy, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, stressed that releasing the rest of the records would likely boost public trust in the federal government, which he held to be at “an all-time low.”
“There is overwhelming evidence that the CIA was involved in his murder. I think it’s beyond a reasonable doubt at this point,” he told John Catsimatidis on WABC 770 AM’s “Cats Roundtable” on May 7.
The next day, Kennedy made the same allegation during an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity, pointing to “millions of pages of documents,” transcripts, and the accounts of individuals who have claimed involvement over the years.
The Democrat added that it was also the “first instinct” of his father, then-U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy Sr., that the CIA had orchestrated the killing.
“The first phone call that my father made after J. Edgar Hoover told him that his brother had been shot was to the CIA desk officer in Langley [Virginia] … and my father said, ‘Did your people do this?’”
Kennedy said his father subsequently posed the same question to Enrique Ruiz-Williams—a Cuban leader in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, which was directed by the CIA—and then-CIA Director John McCone.
Less than five years after his brother’s murder, Robert F. Kennedy Sr. was assassinated on June 6, 1968.
The CIA has long denied any involvement in the 35th president’s death.
