US releases documents on JFK assassination

The Biden administration on Thursday released another batch of secret government files related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, 59 years after his murder and more than five years after the documents were originally required by law to be publicly disclosed.

The newly released tranche of files — 12,879 documents — were posted by the National Archives and Records Administration here after President Biden issued a memorandum.

“[The] profound national tragedy of President Kennedy’s assassination continues to resonate in American history and in the memories of so many Americans who were alive on that terrible day; meanwhile, the need to protect records concerning the assassination has weakened with the passage of time,’’ Biden wrote in the memorandum. “It is therefore critical to ensure that the United States Government maximizes transparency by disclosing all information in records concerning the assassination, except when the strongest possible reasons counsel otherwise.’’

President Kennedy’s assassination — and the subsequent withholding of government documents related to his death — spawned conspiracy theories over nearly six decades, particularly surrounding gunman Lee Harvey Oswald. The Warren Commission concluded that Oswald acted alone when he killed the president on Nov. 22, 1963, and there was no conspiracy.

A large number of the documents released Thursday belonged to the CIA.

One document, dated June 22, 1962, notes Oswald was mentioned in a recent Washington Post article as having defected to the Soviet Union — indicating Oswald was on the CIA’s radar more than a year before the Kennedy assassination.

“A former Marine Sgt. of Fort Worth, Texas, who defected to the USSR three years ago, left Moscow recently together with his infant child and Russianborn wife bound for the United States,’’ the document said.

With Thursday’s release, 95 percent of the documents in the CIA’s JFK assassination records collection will have been released in their entirety, a CIA spokesperson said in a statement, and no documents will remain redacted or withheld in full after “an intensive one-year review’’ of all previously unreleased information.

The CIA spokesperson justified the continued redaction of some documents, saying they contain information that details CIA intelligence sources and methods — some from as recent as the late-1990s.