Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Trump to allow release of JFK documents
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump has decided not to block the release of a final batch of thousands of classified government documents related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Trump announced on Twitter on Saturday morning.
“Subject to the receipt of further information, I will be allowing, as President, the long blocked and classified JFK FILES to be opened,” Trump wrote.
The release of the information being held in secret at the National Archives — including several thousand never-before-seen documents — was mandated to occur by this Thursday under a 1992 law that sought to quell conspiracy theories about the assassination.
Trump has the power to block the release of the documents, and intelligence agencies have pressured him to do so for at least some of them. The agencies are concerned that information contained in some of the documents could damage national security interests.
The president did not make clear what he meant when he said in his tweet that the release of the documents would be “subject to the receipt of further information.” A White House official did not immediately respond to emails seeking clarification.
It is not known what revelations might be in the unreleased documents, though researchers and authors of books about Kennedy say they do not expect any bombshells that significantly alter the official narrative of the assassination — that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in Dallas — delivered in 1964 by the Warren Commission.
But the documents are likely to “help fuel a new generation of conspiracy theories,” according to Philip Shenon, a former New York Times reporter and the author of a book about the commission, and Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia professor and author of a book about Kennedy. The men co-wrote a recent article about the documents for Politico’s website.
They wrote that the documents relate to what they call a “mysterious chapter in the history of the assassination — a six-day trip that JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald paid to Mexico City several weeks before the president’s murder, in which Oswald met with Cuban and Soviet spies and came under intensive surveillance by the CIA’s Mexico City station. Previously released FBI documents suggest that Oswald spoke openly in Mexico about his intention to kill Kennedy.”
With the Thursday deadline to release the remaining documents fast approaching, Trump had been under increasing pressure from advocates of transparency not to hold back any of the documents from the public on the grounds of national security.
Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, introduced a resolution in the Senate this month that urged Trump to make a “full public release of all remaining records,” saying that he should “reject any claims for the continued postponement of the full public release of those records.”
Conspiracy theorists have long clamored for what they hope will be evidence to prove that the government covered up the truth about the assassination. Last week, Roger Stone, a friend of Trump’s, told Alex Jones, the radio host and conspiracy theorist, that Stone had directly urged the president to release all the documents.
“I had the opportunity to make the case directly to the president of the United States by phone as to why I believe it is essential that he release the balance of the currently redacted and classified JFK assassination documents,” Stone said on Jones’ radio program.
Trump is no stranger to conspiracy theories, including those involving the Kennedy assassination. During the presidential campaign, he raised a theory about Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican primary rival from Texas.
“You know, his father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald’s being — you know, shot,” Trump told Fox News in an interview in May 2016, as he battled the Texas senator for the nomination. “I mean, the whole thing is ridiculous. What is this, right, prior to his being shot, and nobody brings it up. They don’t even talk about that. That was reported and nobody talks about it. But I think it’s horrible.”
The allegation was prompted by a black-andwhite photo of Oswald taken in August 1963. Cruz campaign spokesman Catherine Frazier told The Associated Press in April 2016 that the man photographed with Oswald, who was never identified by the Warren Commission, was not Cruz’s father.