Trump says he can’t open JFK files, after all
WASHINGTON — U.S. President Donald Trump said last fall that he would open all remaining John F. Kennedy assassination records. So far, Trump hasn’t made good on the “great transparency” he promised then.
Trump announced on Thursday that the public must wait another three years or more before seeing material that must remain classified for national security reasons — more than five decades after Kennedy was killed Nov. 23, 1963, in Dallas, Texas.
The U.S. National Archives released a batch of more than 19,000 records on Thursday. But an undisclosed amount of material remains under wraps because Trump said the potential harm to U.S. national security, law enforcement or foreign affairs is “of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in immediate disclosure.”
CIA spokesman Nicole de Haay said the agency has released more than 99 per cent of CIA information that was in the assassination records collection. “CIA narrowly redacted information in rare instances only to protect CIA assets, officers and their families as well as intelligence methods, operations and partnerships that remain critical to the security of our nation,” she said.
Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics and author of a book about Kennedy, lamented that it might be 100 years post-assassination before everyone has a more complete picture of what happened. “I envy the scholars of, say, 2063,” Sabato said.
The files released Thursday — mostly FBI and CIA records — detail how authorities combed through tips in the wake of Kennedy’s death, including a report from a woman who claimed she saw a man who looked like assassin Lee Harvey Oswald at a party in Mexico City.
Another file shows ex-CIA officer David Atlee Phillips being grilled by lawmakers about whether he believed Oswald was the lone assassin. Phillips said he wished there was information showing the Soviets or former Cuban leader Fidel Castro had played a role “because there are so many people, especially on college campuses who are convinced the CIA did it.”
But Phillips said since there was no evidence showing Cuban or Soviet involvement, he had to believe Oswald was just “a kind of loony fellow who decided to shoot the president.”