Trump Orders Release of Partial Records of JFK Assassination

John F. Kennedy, the 42nd President of the USA was assassinated in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963. The photograph shows John F Kennedy and Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy arriving at Love Field in Dallas, Texas less than an hour before his assassination. Photograph: Handout/Reuters

WASHINGTON (TIP): “The American public expects — and deserves — its Government to provide as much access as possible to the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records (records) so that the people may finally be fully informed about all aspects of this pivotal event.  Therefore, I am ordering today that the veil finally be lifted”. Donald Trump thus decreed, on October 26, 2017, the release of documents concerning John F. Kennedy’s assassination, setting off speculation about new information on an assassination that had shaken the American nation on November 22, 1963.

However, all records have not been ordered to be released yet. The 26th October order says, “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,” he wrote. “I have no choice — today — but to accept those redactions rather than allow potentially irreversible harm to our Nation’s security.”

Still, he warned that agency heads should be “extremely circumspect” in asking for further postponing the release of any of the documents, saying: “The need for continued protection can only have grown weaker with the passage of time.”

President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.
Photo courtesy Newseum / PRNewsfoto file

Trump “wants to ensure there is full transparency here,” a senior administration official said at a briefing. He is “expecting agencies to do a better job in reducing conflict within redactions and get this information out as quickly as possible.”

The National Archives published nearly 3,000 previously sealed or censored documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on Thursday, but the White House said it was delaying the release of others.

Under a 1992 law inspired by the conspiracist movie “JFK,” the National Archives was supposed to have released all of the remaining records by midnight ET — unless President Donald Trump objected on national security grounds.

In the end, the president allowed the release of 2,891 of at least 3,140 documents, with the rest subject to a 180-day review of redactions from objecting agencies. The White House said later that the remaining records would be released “on a rolling basis in the coming weeks.”

About 200 pages of the new batch are expected to delve into the six-day visit that Oswald, a onetime Marine who had defected to the Soviet Union, made to Mexico City just before Kennedy’s assassination. One of the juiciest stories is likely to be that of June Cobb, a CIA spy working in Cuba and Mexico, who reported that Oswald had been spotted in Mexico City.

Cobb, born Viola June Cobb in Ponca City, Oklahoma, died Oct. 17, 2015, in New York, where she was living in a Manhattan senior center, an official there and her former sister-in-law told NBC News.

As journalists, scholars and assassination buffs began scouring the thousands of pages Thursday night, it remained to be seen whether the document dump would satisfy the many people who still dispute the finding of the Warren Commission that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he gunned down Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963.

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