The Trump administration dropped thousands of classified documents on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy Tuesday as part of their larger quest for transparency.
On Monday, President Donald Trump announced that most of the 80,000 pages remaining on Kennedy’s murder would be released in full—without any redactions—and quipped that the public has “a lot of reading” to do. On Tuesday evening, 1,123 PDF files were uploaded to the National Archives which noted “as the records continue to be digitized, they will be posted to this page.”
The outcome of the documents in full is yet to be determined, however according to The New York Times, most documents were shorter than 10 pages and mainly consisted of handwritten notes or typewritten reports. Most are difficult to read with age, the Times notes, with the burdensome process behind their digitization further compounding their illegibility.
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David Garrow, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian who has considerably worked on American intelligence agencies, told the Times that Tuesday’s dump is “profoundly more impenetrable than all the previous more annotated ones.” He explained that many of the files lacked a file number or which agency they originated from.
One file, he said, discussed “random Cuban stuff from 1965.”
Another historian, Tim Naftali, similarly told the outlet that his long expedition into the JFK trove has so far yielded no relic of importance. “I am trying to find stuff that has been re-reviewed and re-released with new information,” Naftali shared. “Some have and some have not.”
This was expected however, by both historians and officials within the Trump administration who reportedly told the New York Post that they didn’t expect anything revelatory to be released. While some new details may be included, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics and author of The Kennedy Half-Century Larry J. Sabato told the Associated Press that it will take some time for experts to sift through the documents to discern if there is anything of significance.
“We have a lot of work to do for a long time to come, and people just have to accept that,” Sabato reiterated.
The National Archives states that around 99 percent of the estimated 320,000 known Kennedy documents have been publicly released since Congress passed a 1992 law requiring their disclosure. Some documents however remain under court-ordered seals, and the FBI claimed to have even found an additional 2,400 records linked to Kennedy’s assassination last month.
The former president was killed on Nov. 22, 1963, during a visit to Dallas where he was shot in his open-car motorcade. His assassination has long been the subject of national fascination, inspiring a slew of conspiracies and enriching an environment of distrust toward the government.
In 1964, the Warren Commission found that Kennedy was killed by 24-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald, who they said acted alone. Oswald however, died two days after being arrested in 1963 when nightclub owner Jack Ruby shot him during a jail transfer.
Conspirators have long held the belief that Kennedy’s death was orchestrated on a scale beyond Oswald, with the CIA, the Mafia, the KGB, Fidel Castro, and even Kennedy’s vice president, Lyndon B. Johnson, floated as masterminds behind the assassination.
While the declassified documents may not yet prove anything new, they certainly seem to have struck a chord with Kennedy’s grandson Jack Schlossberg, who wrote on X Tuesday night: “No—THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION DID NOT GIVE ANYONE IN PRESIDENT KENNEDY’S FAMILY ‘A HEADS UP’ ABOUT THE RELEASE.
“A total surprise, and not shocker !! But @RobertKennedyJr definitely knew,” he added.
The Kennedy heir also dismissed CNN for covering the files’ release, proclaiming in a video posted to X: “There’s so much actual news going on, why are you covering this?”
