The crucial JFK file that was not released and still remains secret
Crucial information was missing from the JFK assassination files released by the Trump administration on Tuesday, according to an expert.
The transcript of the first conversation between president Lyndon Johnson and CIA Director John McCone after the 1963 assassination has still not been released to the public, author James Johnston told USA Today.
The document could help answer questions about any possible involvement from Cuba in the Kennedy’s killing, since the president had famously tried to use the CIA to kill communist dictator Fidel Castro.
McCone has previously been accused of keeping ‘incendiary’ information from the Warren Commission that probed the assassination, as reported by Politico.
The sensitive information revolved around the existence of plots to assassinate Castro, which put the CIA ‘in cahoots with the mafia.’
Without this information, the Warren Commission never looked at whether Oswald could have had accomplices in Cuba or elsewhere who wanted JFK dead as retaliation for trying to kill Castro.
McCone’s cover-up was claimed to be ‘benign’ because he and other top CIA officials wanted the commission to focus on Lee Harvey Oswald, who they truly believed acted as a lone shooter.
The files included typewritten reports and handwritten notes spanning decades, including details of a top CIA agent who claimed the deep state was responsible and Lee Harvey Oswald (pictured) being a ‘poor shot’
The files included typewritten reports and handwritten notes spanning decades, including details of a top CIA agent who claimed the deep state was responsible and Lee Harvey Oswald (pictured) being a ‘poor shot’
More than 63,000 pages of records related to the 1963 assassination of president Kennedy were released Tuesday following an order by President Donald Trump, many without the redactions that had confounded historians for years and helped fuel conspiracy theories.
The US National Archives and Records Administration posted to its website roughly 2,200 files containing the documents.
They included typewritten reports and handwritten notes spanning decades, including details of a top CIA agent who claimed the deep state was responsible, Oswald being a ‘poor shot’ and that Secret Service had been warned Kennedy would be killed in August, three months before the murder.
The rollout of the files stunned Trump’s national security team, who spent 24 hours racing to assess security hazards ahead of publication.
When the files were released at around 7pm, it sparked widespread backlash, from liberals claiming it was just a repeat of a similar drop by Joe Biden years ago, to MAGA fans angered that the pages still contained redactions and left questions, leading experts to describe the files as ‘impenetrable.’
The vast majority of the National Archives’ collection of over 6 million pages of records, photographs, motion pictures, sound recordings and artifacts related to the assassination have previously been released.
President Donald Trump said during a media event at the Kennedy Center that the files were all going to be released on Tuesday
Before Tuesday, researchers had estimated that 3,000 to 3,500 files were still unreleased, either wholly or partially. And just last month the FBI said it had discovered about 2,400 new records related to the assassination.
Jefferson Morley, vice president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, a repository for files related to the assassination, said in a statement posted on the social platform X that the release is ‘an encouraging start.’ He said much of the ‘rampant overclassification of trivial information has been eliminated’ from the documents.
The National Archives said on its website that in accordance with the president’s directive, the release would encompass ‘all records previously withheld for classification.’ But Morley said what was released Tuesday did not include two-thirds of the promised files, any of the recently discovered FBI files or 500 Internal Revenue Service records.
Interest in details related to Kennedy’s assassination has been intense over the decades, with countless conspiracy theories spawned about multiple shooters and involvement by the Soviet Union and mafia.
JFK was killed Nov. 22, 1963, on a visit to Dallas, when his motorcade was finishing its parade route downtown and shots rang out from the Texas School Book Depository building.
Police arrested 24-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald, who had positioned himself from a sniper’s perch on the sixth floor.
Two days later nightclub owner Jack Ruby fatally shot Oswald during a jail transfer, sparking one the earlier conspiracy theories – that Oswald had been killed to stop him talking about whoever had set him up.
A year after the assassination, the Warren Commission, which president Johnson established to investigate, concluded that Oswald acted alone and that there was no evidence of a conspiracy.
But that didn’t quell a web of alternative theories over the decades.
One of the most popular theories asserts there was a second gunman who fired shots at JFK from a now-iconic ‘grassy knoll’ to the right of his car as it passed by.
No definitive proof of that claim has ever been shared.
