This past weekend President Trump announced on Twitter that he would allow the release of “thousands of classified documents about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy after years of delays,” 1 in the interest of transparency. The never before seen documents are set to be released by the National Archives by Oct. 26, unless proven there could be a security issue with their release. (In 1992, Congress mandated that all assassination documents had to be released within 25 years, President Trump has the power to block them should making them public “harm intelligence or military operations, law enforcement or foreign relations.”2)
The National Archives is supposed to disclose the remaining files related to Kennedy’s assassination by Thursday, including more than 3,000 documents that have never been released to the public and more than 30,000 that were previously released but with redactions.
Many believe the files may provide “insight into assassin Lee Harvey Oswald’s trip to Mexico City weeks before the killing, during which he visited the Soviet and Cuban embassies. Oswald’s stated reason for going was to get visas that would allow him to enter Cuba and the Soviet Union, according to the Warren Commission, the investigative body established by President Lyndon B. Johnson, but much about the trip remains unknown.”3
Many also believe the files will show that Oswald was trained and put in place by the CIA.
“The National Archives in July published online more than 440 never-before-seen assassination documents and thousands of others that had been released previously with redactions.
Among those documents was a 1975 internal CIA memo that questioned whether Oswald became motivated to kill Kennedy after reading an AP article in a newspaper that quoted Fidel Castro as saying ‘U.S. leaders would be in danger if they helped in any attempt to do away with leaders of Cuba.”‘ 4
However, the files that haven’t been fully released were those deemed “not believed relevant,” by the Assassination Records Review. Apparently, the members didn’t want to hide any info directly related to Kennedy’s assassination but now realize there may be “nuggets of information” in the files that they didn’t realize were important two decades ago.
We shall see.
