Washington
The president allowed the immediate release of 2,800 records by the National Archives, following a last-minute scramble to meet a 25-year legal deadline. Following lobbying by national security officials, the remaining documents will be reviewed during a 180-day period. In a memo released by the White House, Trump said: “I am ordering today that the veil finally be lifted. At the same time, executive departments and agencies have proposed to me that certain information should continue to be redacted because of national security, law enforcement, and foreign affairs concerns. I have no choice — today — but to accept those redactions rather than allow potentially irreversible harm to our nation’s security.”
The records were put online at 7:30 p.m. The thousands of field reports, cables and interview summaries from dozens of FBI, CIA and congressional investigators reveal the minutiae of a chase for information that spanned decades and covered continents. Usually typed, stamped “Secret” and often annotated by hand, the files are a paper trail of detective grunt work, leads exhausted, dead-ends encountered, sources checked and rechecked.
Many of the files reveal the desperate search for Lee Harvey Oswald’s possible connections to communists, Cubans, or both, in the months before he shot Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963.
Several show the FBI’s often extraordinary efforts to identify suspected communists in the United States. Dozens of them amount to brief records on individuals whose names were drawn from the mailing list for a publication called “The Worker.”
Some documents summarize internal discussions within Communist Party meetings after the assassination, discussing whether Oswald was innocent and whether communists would be blamed for Kennedy’s death. Agents ran down rumors from prisoners and poets.
One FBI memo from April 1964 details Director J. Edgar Hoover’s interest in connecting key players. He tells the New York field office to check out a tip that, prior to the assassination, “a meeting took place at Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club in Dallas,” attended by Ruby, a man whose name is illegible, and Dallas Police Officer J.D. Tippit,” who was shot by Oswald as he fled from the scene of the Kennedy shooting.
Oswald, a troubled former Marine who’d temporarily defected to the Soviet Union at one point, was killed by Ruby at Dallas police headquarters on live television — a stunning turn that fueled decades of conspiracy theories.
The government was facing a Thursday deadline for disclosing the records, and Trump had tweeted twice that the documents would be made public.
“The long anticipated release of the #JFKFiles will take place tomorrow,” he promised on Wednesday. “So interesting!”
Given Trump’s enthusiasm, legions of assassination scholars, professionals and hobbyists alike had been waiting throughout the day to begin a reading frenzy. Any delay or limitations of the release could only be ordered by the president.
In his memo Thursday night, Trump said that any agency wanting to continue withholding documents after April 26 “should be extremely circumspect in recommending any further postponement of full disclosure of records.”
Some of the material that assassination experts had been most eager to review were not included in the documents released on Thursday. The missing records include a 338-page file on J. Walton Moore, the head of the CIA office in Dallas at the time of the killing, and an 18-page dossier on Gordon McClendon, a Dallas businessman who conferred with Ruby just before he shot Oswald. Several files on notorious anti-Castro Cuban exiles were apparently withheld, including those focusing on Luis Posada and Orlando Bosch, who had been accused of a 1976 airline bombing that killed 73 people.
Researchers had hoped the release would shed new light on Oswald’s movements and contacts in the months before he shot Kennedy. Historians were particularly eager for new details of Oswald’s six-day trip to Mexico City, where he met with Cubans and Soviets two months before the assassination.
None of those documents appeared to be in the batch released Thursday. Nor were there revelations on Watergate burglars E. Howard Hunt and James McCord, both of whom were longtime CIA operatives of interest to assassination theorists.
Experts did not expect any of the long-classified material to deliver a blow to the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Oswald acted as the lone gunman in Dealey Plaza.
The release was mandated by a 1992 act of Congress that was meant to finally empty the official cupboards of classified material that had been shrouded in controversy and hearsay for decades. The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Act, signed by President George H.W. Bush on Oct. 26, 1992, required that “each assassination record shall be publicly disclosed in full … no later than the date that is 25 years after the date” of its enactment.
But there was an out: The president would have the right to withhold some records that, if revealed, would harm national security and outweigh “the public interest in disclosure.” The law also requires the administration to publish an unclassified explanation for the postponement in the Federal Register.
David Boren, the former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee who co-sponsored the records release law, said in a statement on Thursday to The Post: “It was my intention that all documents be released in unredacted form except for in the most rare, exceptional circumstances involving current and continuing national security concerns.”
Trump had been lobbied to withhold some of the files by CIA Director Mike Pompeo, according to Trump confidant Roger Stone. Stone, a political consultant who wrote a book alleging that Lyndon B. Johnson had Kennedy murdered, pushed Trump to release everything and hailed the president’s decision as a victory on Twitter.
But in an interview on Wednesday, Stone said he worried that the intelligence community might still persuade his friend not to release all the papers, or that the files might be heavily redacted. He cited a previous release of classified material that left researchers disappointed.
“If the data dump that the National Archives did in July of a small amount of JFK-related material is any indication, the fallback of the intelligence agencies appears to be redact and withhold as much of this information as possible,” Stone said. “They’ll use the broad rubric of national security. If the censorship is so great to make the president’s order meaningless, it’ll get litigated in the courts.”
In a statement, the CIA said its redactions were meant to protect national security interests — the names of CIA assets and current and former CIA officers, intelligence-gathering methods and sensitive partnerships that remain viable today.