It’s that time again. The 59th Anniver­sary of the JFK assas­si­na­tion. Or rather, the 59th Anniver­sary of the JFK assas­si­na­tion and sub­se­quent offi­cial coverup. 59 year of ‘the more things change, the more they stay the same’. No mat­ter how much new damn­ing evi­dence gets released, there’s always been this giant trove of still-clas­si­fied files that gov­ern­ment agen­cies have repeat­ed­ly refused to release. That was all sup­posed to change in 2017 when a sup­pos­ed­ly con­crete dead­line for the release of all clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion relat­ed to the JFK assas­si­na­tion was sup­posed to be released. Instead, then-Pres­i­dent Trump decid­ed to side with the CIA and FBI and agreed to waive the dead­line, which brings us back to where we are.

A new dead­line for the release of mate­ri­als was set for Decem­ber 15 next month by Pres­i­dent Biden. But as we’re going to see, the word­ing of that dead­line appears to still allow for the same kinds of bureau­crat­ic refusal to turn over the doc­u­ments that’s been used in the past. So we’re going to see what ulti­mate­ly gets released in a few weeks of the more than 14,000 JFK-relat­ed doc­u­ments still clas­si­fied. But in the mean­time, it turns out we got a new batch of released files. Files show­ing the cor­re­spon­dences between the Nation­al Archives and the var­i­ous gov­ern­ment agen­cies that are still refus­ing to release these files. It turns out the cor­re­spon­dences were obtained via a FOIA request by Lar­ry Schnapf, a lawyer who is rep­re­sent­ing the Mary Fer­rell Foun­da­tion in a law­suit filed against the Pres­i­dent Biden and the Nation­al Archives, demand­ing release of all the still-clas­si­fied assas­si­na­tion doc­u­ments. Inter­est­ing­ly, while Schnapf filed the law­suit against the Nation­al Archives, he actu­al­ly prais­es them for their efforts. It’s the oth­er agen­cies that are refus­ing to release the doc­u­ments. That’s the sto­ry that unfolds in these released cor­re­spon­dences. The Nation­al Archives kept inform­ing agen­cies like the FBI and CIA that they are not abid­ing by the law. For years.

It’s also notable that the Nation­al Archives has been telling the pub­lic not to expect any major bomb­shells when the doc­u­ments are being released. So if the still-clas­si­fied files aren’t filled with assas­si­na­tion bomb­shells, why are so many gov­ern­ment agen­cies unwill­ing to allow their release? It’s part of the ongo­ing mys­tery. Maybe the Archives is just unaware of the full damn­ing nature of some of these doc­u­ments. Or maybe they’re damn­ing, but in rela­tion to oth­er things like the CIA’s rela­tion­ship with orga­nized crime and not nec­es­sar­i­ly damn­ing in rela­tion to the assas­si­na­tion. Or per­haps each indi­vid­ual file isn’t real­ly damn­ing on its own, but the col­lec­tion of them togeth­er paints a damn­ing pic­ture. We don’t real­ly know what’s still hid­ing in those 14,000 still-clas­si­fied doc­u­ments. But it’s pret­ty damn clear the agen­cies that ran that coverup want that to be the case for as long as pos­si­ble. And 59 years isn’t long enough:

Politi­co

Why We Still Don’t Have the JFK Assas­si­na­tion Files

The FBI and the CIA are still pro­tect­ing their sources from six decades ago.
John F. Kennedy wav­ing from a car, with Jacque­line Kennedy sit­ting next to him.

By Philip Shenon
11/15/2022 11:00 AM EST

Philip Shenon, a for­mer Wash­ing­ton and for­eign cor­re­spon­dent for the New York Times, is author of A Cru­el and Shock­ing Act: The Secret His­to­ry of the Kennedy Assas­si­na­tion.

Almost exact­ly 59 years after those rifle shots rang out in Dealey Plaza, left a pres­i­dent mor­tal­ly wound­ed and changed the course of his­to­ry, there are still secrets that the gov­ern­ment admits it is deter­mined to keep about the Novem­ber 1963 assas­si­na­tion of Pres­i­dent John F. Kennedy. More than 14,000 clas­si­fied doc­u­ments some­how relat­ed to the president’s mur­der remain locked away, in part or in full, at the Nation­al Archives in clear vio­la­tion of the spir­it of a land­mark 1992 trans­paren­cy law that was sup­posed to force the release of vir­tu­al­ly all of them years ago.

The fact that any­thing about the assas­si­na­tion is still clas­si­fied — and that the CIA, FBI and oth­er agen­cies have refused to pro­vide the pub­lic with a detailed expla­na­tion of why — has con­vinced an army of con­spir­a­cy the­o­rists that their cyn­i­cism has always been jus­ti­fied.

New­ly released inter­nal cor­re­spon­dence from the Nation­al Archives and Records Admin­is­tra­tion reveals that, behind the scenes, there has been a fierce bureau­crat­ic war over the doc­u­ments in recent years, pit­ting the Archives against the CIA, FBI and oth­er agen­cies that want to keep them secret.

The cor­re­spon­dence, obtained under the Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act, shows that the Archives has tried, and often failed, to insist that oth­er agen­cies com­ply with the 1992 law by declas­si­fy­ing more doc­u­ments. The strug­gle was espe­cial­ly fierce in 2017, when then-Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump sided with the CIA and FBI and agreed to waive a sup­pos­ed­ly con­crete legal dead­line that year to release all clas­si­fied doc­u­ments relat­ed to the JFK assas­si­na­tion.

Last year, Pres­i­dent Joe Biden ordered anoth­er review of the doc­u­ments to allow more to be made pub­lic this Decem­ber. Offi­cials involved in the declas­si­fi­ca­tion process say they are opti­mistic that a large batch of doc­u­ments will be made pub­lic next month.

The inter­nal cor­re­spon­dence from the Archives helps resolve one lin­ger­ing mys­tery about the doc­u­ments: In their nego­ti­a­tions with the White House and the Archives in recent years, how have the CIA, FBI, the Pen­ta­gon and oth­er agen­cies jus­ti­fied keep­ing any secrets about a turn­ing point in Amer­i­can his­to­ry that occurred decades ago — an event that has always inspired cor­ro­sive con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries about gov­ern­ment com­plic­i­ty?

...

The Archives cor­re­spon­dence reveals, for the first time, their detailed jus­ti­fi­ca­tions, pro­vid­ing a rare win­dow into rea­son­ing inside the CIA and FBI. In many cas­es, it shows, the CIA and FBI pressed to keep doc­u­ments secret because they con­tained the names and per­son­al details of still-liv­ing intel­li­gence and law-enforce­ment infor­mants from the 1960’s and 1970’s who could be at risk of intim­i­da­tion or even vio­lence if they were pub­licly iden­ti­fied.

Many of those sources — now elder­ly, if not close to death — are for­eign­ers liv­ing out­side the Unit­ed States, which means it would be more dif­fi­cult for the Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment to pro­tect them from threats. The CIA has also with­held infor­ma­tion in the doc­u­ments that iden­ti­fies the loca­tion of CIA sta­tions and safe­hous­es abroad, includ­ing sev­er­al that have been in use con­tin­u­ous­ly since Kennedy’s death in 1963.

The Archives cor­re­spon­dence shows that, while much of the still-clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion is only indi­rect­ly relat­ed to the assas­si­na­tion, some of it comes direct­ly from the FBI’s “main inves­tiga­tive case files” about the president’s mur­der. That includes the all-impor­tant case files on Lee Har­vey Oswald, Kennedy’s assas­sin, and Jack Ruby, the Dal­las strip-club own­er who mur­dered Oswald two days after Kennedy’s death.

The Archives paper­work shows that the FBI and Drug Enforce­ment Admin­is­tra­tion have fought par­tic­u­lar­ly hard to pro­tect the iden­ti­ty of infor­mants in orga­nized-crime inves­ti­ga­tions — an argu­ment that will intrigue con­spir­a­cy the­o­rists who believe the Mafia was behind Kennedy’s death. Many assas­si­na­tion researchers argue that the assas­si­na­tion was blow­back for the so-called war on orga­nized crime waged by the president’s broth­er, then-Attor­ney Gen­er­al Robert Kennedy.

In fact, the cor­re­spon­dence shows the over­whelm­ing major­i­ty of the doc­u­ments that the FBI has with­held from the pub­lic in recent years some­how involved orga­nized-crime inves­ti­ga­tions. Of the near­ly 7,500 doc­u­ments that the FBI kept clas­si­fied at the time of the 2017 dead­line, 6,000 were from “var­i­ous files of mem­bers of orga­nized crime or La Cosa Nos­tra.”

The DEA made a spe­cial plea to black out the names of six con­fi­den­tial infor­mants iden­ti­fied in assas­si­na­tion-relat­ed files involv­ing orga­nized-crime inves­ti­ga­tions: “Giv­en the well-doc­u­ment­ed propen­si­ty for vio­lence by the Mafia, it is rea­son­able to expect the indi­vid­u­als, if alive, remain in sig­nif­i­cant dan­ger of retal­i­a­tion for their assis­tance,” the agency said in a 2018 let­ter to the Archives.

The inter­nal cor­re­spon­dence and emails from the Archives were pro­vid­ed to POLITICO Mag­a­zine by Lar­ry Schnapf, a New York lawyer who filed a fed­er­al law­suit last month against Pres­i­dent Biden and the Nation­al Archives, demand­ing release of all the still-clas­si­fied assas­si­na­tion doc­u­ments. Schnapf, whose clients in the law­suit include the Mary Fer­rell Foun­da­tion, an assas­si­na­tion-research group, obtained the inter­nal cor­re­spon­dence from the Archives under a Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act request.

Even though he is now suing the Nation­al Archives, he said in an inter­view he was impressed by the aggres­sive­ness of Archives offi­cials in try­ing to force the CIA, FBI and oth­er agen­cies to abide by the 1992 law, which called for the declas­si­fi­ca­tion of all assas­si­na­tion-relat­ed doc­u­ments with­in 25 years — a dead­line reached in Octo­ber 2017. The fact that so much infor­ma­tion remains clas­si­fied today “only feeds a lot of the more bizarre con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries” about Kennedy’s death, he said.

The 1992 law, the John F. Kennedy Assas­si­na­tion Records Col­lec­tion Act, was adopt­ed by Con­gress in hopes of con­trol­ling a firestorm of con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries whipped up the year before by the release of Oliv­er Stone’s pop­u­lar, con­spir­a­cy-soaked film JFK, which sug­gest­ed Kennedy was killed in a coup d’etat involv­ing his suc­ces­sor, Pres­i­dent Lyn­don John­son. Opin­ion polls have shown con­sis­tent­ly since the late 1960’s that most Amer­i­cans believe there was a con­spir­a­cy in Kennedy’s death — that Oswald, assum­ing he was the assas­sin in Dealey Plaza in Dal­las, did not act alone.

As a result of the law, mil­lions of pages of doc­u­ments were made pub­lic in the 1990’s that rewrote ele­ments of the his­to­ry of the assas­si­na­tion. The declas­si­fied files did not offer con­clu­sive proof of any sort of con­spir­a­cy in the president’s death. But they did reveal how much evi­dence — espe­cial­ly about Oswald — had been with­held by the CIA and FBI from the War­ren Com­mis­sion, the White House pan­el led by Chief Jus­tice Earl War­ren that con­clud­ed in 1964 that Oswald had almost cer­tain­ly act­ed alone.

Some files declas­si­fied as a result of the 1992 law strong­ly sug­gest­ed, for exam­ple, that the CIA’s Mex­i­co City sta­tion cov­ered up evi­dence of its aggres­sive sur­veil­lance of Oswald dur­ing his mys­te­ri­ous trip to the Mex­i­can cap­i­tal just sev­er­al weeks before the assas­si­na­tion, includ­ing the fact that Oswald boast­ed there of his inten­tion to kill Kennedy. The doc­u­ments show that, if the CIA sta­tion in Mex­i­co had act­ed quick­ly on what it learned in Sep­tem­ber and Octo­ber 1963, Kennedy might have sur­vived his trip to Dal­las on Nov. 22. Accord­ing to a bare-bones index at the Archives, sev­er­al of the still-clas­si­fied assas­si­na­tion doc­u­ments are drawn from the files of the U.S. embassy in Mex­i­co — the CIA sta­tion, in par­tic­u­lar.

In 2013, the CIA’s in-house his­to­ri­an con­clud­ed that the spy agency had con­duct­ed a “benign cov­er-up” dur­ing the War­ren Commission’s inves­ti­ga­tion in 1963 and 1964 in hopes of keep­ing the com­mis­sion focused on “what the Agency believed was the ‘best truth’ — that Lee Har­vey Oswald, for as yet unde­ter­mined motives, had act­ed alone in killing John Kennedy.”

Oth­er gov­ern­ment agen­cies have offered dif­fer­ent jus­ti­fi­ca­tions for with­hold­ing infor­ma­tion in the still-clas­si­fied assas­si­na­tion files, the new­ly dis­closed Archives cor­re­spon­dence shows.

The Defense Depart­ment told the Archives in 2018 that it would con­tin­ue to black out por­tions of 256 clas­si­fied Pen­ta­gon doc­u­ments since they iden­ti­fy “active U.S. war plans, for­eign gov­ern­ment infor­ma­tion, sen­si­tive nuclear weapons infor­ma­tion and U.S. pris­on­er of war per­son­al and debrief­ing infor­ma­tion.” Even so, the Pen­ta­gon assured the Archives, “the records iden­ti­fied are not direct­ly relat­ed to the assas­si­na­tion.”

In its 2018 cor­re­spon­dence with the Archives, the State Depart­ment request­ed that por­tions of 31 doc­u­ments be kept secret because of “nation­al secu­ri­ty and for­eign affairs con­cerns,” although it not­ed that “none of the department’s redac­tions relate direct­ly to the JFK assas­si­na­tion.”

The cor­re­spon­dence shows that the Archives, which has housed the assas­si­na­tion records for decades, has long warned the CIA, FBI and oth­er agen­cies that they are fail­ing to abide by require­ments of the 1992 law, which allowed JFK-assas­si­na­tion infor­ma­tion to remain clas­si­fied only if there was “clear and con­vinc­ing evi­dence” of a “sub­stan­tial risk of harm” to nation­al secu­ri­ty or for­eign pol­i­cy.

In a memo in August 2017, William J. Bosanko, chief oper­at­ing offi­cer of the Nation­al Archives, protest­ed the FBI’s deci­sion to con­tin­ue to with­hold the names of con­fi­den­tial sources from the 1960’s, espe­cial­ly those that came direct­ly out of the case files on Oswald and Ruby. “These files clear­ly relate direct­ly to the assas­si­na­tion,” he said. Besides, he not­ed, “it is dif­fi­cult to imag­ine cir­cum­stances under which an indi­vid­ual could be harmed by the release of their name in a file in the JFK col­lec­tion.”

But the protests by the Archives were over­ruled at the last minute by Trump. His deci­sion in Octo­ber 2017 to waive the dead­line sur­prised many in the gov­ern­ment since the for­mer pres­i­dent has been an enthu­si­as­tic con­spir­a­cy the­o­rist for decades, includ­ing about the Kennedy assas­si­na­tion, and had once promised “great trans­paren­cy” in releas­ing the doc­u­ments.

Dur­ing the 2016 pres­i­den­tial cam­paign, Trump repeat­ed­ly pro­mot­ed a con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry that the father of one of his Repub­li­can oppo­nents, Sen­a­tor Ted Cruz of Texas, was some­how tied to the assas­si­na­tion — a claim, denied by the Cruz fam­i­ly, based on a grainy 1963 pho­to­graph that showed Oswald stand­ing next to a man who resem­bled Cruz’s father as both hand­ed out fliers sup­port­ing Cuban leader Fidel Cas­tro.

In decid­ing to with­hold thou­sands of doc­u­ments, Trump said he was con­vinced they con­tained infor­ma­tion about nation­al secu­ri­ty and for­eign pol­i­cy “of such grav­i­ty that it out­weighs the pub­lic inter­est in imme­di­ate dis­clo­sure.” But he offered no specifics about his rea­son­ing; nor did the CIA, the FBI and oth­er agen­cies that urged him to block the release.

Under the 1992 law, only the sit­ting pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States has the pow­er to with­hold doc­u­ments beyond the 2017 dead­line, which means the pow­er now rests entire­ly with Pres­i­dent Biden. Last Octo­ber, Biden ordered the archives to begin a com­pre­hen­sive review of the still-clas­si­fied records, with a goal of releas­ing as many as pos­si­ble by a new dead­line of this Dec. 15.

But his writ­ten order dis­ap­point­ed many his­to­ri­ans and assas­si­na­tion researchers since Biden, like Trump, left open the pos­si­bil­i­ty that some doc­u­ments will remain clas­si­fied for­ev­er. Biden’s order, draw­ing on the word­ing of the 1992 law, said he would allow doc­u­ments to be with­held if their release might do “iden­ti­fi­able harm” to “mil­i­tary defense, intel­li­gence oper­a­tions, law enforce­ment, or the con­di­tion of for­eign rela­tions that is of such grav­i­ty that it out­weighs the pub­lic inter­est in dis­clo­sure.”

The Nation­al Archives said in a state­ment to POLITICO Mag­a­zine that it had recent­ly com­plet­ed its review of the still-clas­si­fied mate­r­i­al and pro­vid­ed its rec­om­men­da­tions to Pres­i­dent Biden about which doc­u­ments should be released on Dec. 15.

Bosanko, the Archives offi­cial over­see­ing the project, said in an inter­view that the recent inter­a­gency review of the JFK doc­u­ments had been the most inten­sive in decades, involv­ing a page-to-page inspec­tion, with the CIA, FBI and oth­er agen­cies pressed to jus­ti­fy why any infor­ma­tion — includ­ing indi­vid­ual names and address­es — should con­tin­ue to be with­held from the pub­lic: “We looked at every sin­gle redac­tion in these doc­u­ments.” He said his team is con­tin­u­ing to nego­ti­ate with the CIA and oth­er agen­cies this month in hopes of con­vinc­ing them — before the Dec. 15 dead­line set by the White House — to lift their oppo­si­tion to releas­ing some of the still-clas­si­fied mate­r­i­al.

A spokes­woman for the CIA said the agency was work­ing close­ly with the Archives with the goal of “releas­ing as much infor­ma­tion in the pub­lic inter­est as pos­si­ble, con­sis­tent with the need to pre­vent harm to intel­li­gence oper­a­tions.” At the time of the 2017 dead­line, the CIA had with­held 250 records in full and redact­ed infor­ma­tion from about 15,000 oth­er doc­u­ments – in some cas­es, just a few names or oth­er words on a sin­gle page, in oth­er cas­es, whole blocks of text. The CIA spokes­woman said that, as a result of declas­si­fi­ca­tion efforts since 2017, the agency is no longer with­hold­ing any doc­u­ments in full.

...

Archives offi­cials and oth­ers in the gov­ern­ment have cau­tioned for years that the pub­lic should not expect to find bomb­shells in the still-secret doc­u­ments – at least no bomb­shells that can be eas­i­ly detect­ed. Many of the pre­vi­ous­ly declas­si­fied CIA and FBI files were full of bureau­crat­ic jar­gon, code­names and obscure for­eign names and address­es that made them incom­pre­hen­si­ble at first, even for expe­ri­enced researchers.

And no mat­ter what Biden decides, about 500 doc­u­ments and oth­er items in the col­lec­tion will remain secret, since the 1992 law exempts them from pub­lic release. Among them are doc­u­ments pro­duced by fed­er­al grand juries and by the Inter­nal Rev­enue Ser­vice, includ­ing the tax and employ­ment records of Oswald, Ruby and many of their asso­ciates.

It also includes tape record­ings of six inter­views con­duct­ed in 1964 with Jacque­line Kennedy and for­mer Attor­ney Gen­er­al Robert Kennedy by the jour­nal­ist William Man­ches­ter, who was autho­rized by the Kennedy fam­i­ly to write a his­to­ry of the assas­si­na­tion. Those tapes were turned over to the Archives by the Kennedy fam­i­ly in exchange for an agree­ment they would not be made pub­lic until 2067 — the 100th anniver­sary of the pub­li­ca­tion of Manchester’s best­selling book The Death of a Pres­i­dent. The law also exempt­ed the pub­lic release of what the Archives index describes as five “very per­son­al let­ters” that Mrs. Kennedy wrote to Pres­i­dent John­son, includ­ing at least three she sent to him in the week after the assas­si­na­tion.

What might be on Manchester’s tapes has long tan­ta­lized his­to­ri­ans and assas­si­na­tion researchers. He lat­er wrote in his mem­oirs that he record­ed 10 hours of wrench­ing con­ver­sa­tions with Mrs. Kennedy, in which she offered a detailed account of events in the days sur­round­ing the assas­si­na­tion, includ­ing a descrip­tion of the hor­ri­fy­ing scene inside the president’s lim­ou­sine as the shots rang out in Dealey Plaza. “She with­held noth­ing,” he wrote. The inter­views in Mrs. Kennedy’s home in George­town were bear­able only because of the cock­tails they drank through­out, he sug­gest­ed. “Future his­to­ri­ans may be puz­zled by the odd clunk­ing nois­es on the tapes,” Man­ches­ter wrote. “They were ice cubes. The only way we could get through those long evenings was with the aid of great con­tain­ers of daiquiris.”

———–

“Why We Still Don’t Have the JFK Assas­si­na­tion Files” By Philip Shenon; Politi­co; 11/15/2022

“New­ly released inter­nal cor­re­spon­dence from the Nation­al Archives and Records Admin­is­tra­tion reveals that, behind the scenes, there has been a fierce bureau­crat­ic war over the doc­u­ments in recent years, pit­ting the Archives against the CIA, FBI and oth­er agen­cies that want to keep them secret.”

A fierce bureau­crat­ic war, with the Nation­al Archives on one side and agen­cies like the CIA, FBI, and State Depart­ment on the oth­er side. That’s the pic­ture depict­ed in the new­ly released inter­nal cor­re­spon­dences obtained by Lar­ry Schnafp, a lawyer whose clients include the Mary Fer­rell Foun­da­tion. As Schnafp notes, while he end­ed up suing the Archives, he’s actu­al­ly been impressed with the agen­cy’s aggres­sive­ness in try­ing to get doc­u­ments released. That aggres­sive­ness is part of what was revealed with these inter­nal cor­re­spon­dences. Aggres­sive­ness in the form of remind­ing agen­cies like the FBI and CIA that they are not abid­ing by the 1992 law that man­dates these dis­clo­sures.

At the same time, as the arti­cle notes, the Archives have for years warned the pub­lic not to expect any bomb­shells. At least not eas­i­ly detect­ed bomb­shells. It’s part of the mys­tery here: the Archives are declar­ing that still-with­held clas­si­fied doc­u­ments aren’t going to be rev­e­la­to­ry and yet its still run­ning into steep resis­tance from the FBI and CIA despite those agen­cies rec­og­niz­ing that they are fuel­ing the per­cep­tion of a cov­er up. It’s the kind of sit­u­a­tion that sug­gests the Archives isn’t ful­ly aware of all of the dif­fer­ent inves­tiga­tive threads that could be pulled should those still-clas­si­fied doc­u­ments get released:

...
The cor­re­spon­dence, obtained under the Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act, shows that the Archives has tried, and often failed, to insist that oth­er agen­cies com­ply with the 1992 law by declas­si­fy­ing more doc­u­ments. The strug­gle was espe­cial­ly fierce in 2017, when then-Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump sided with the CIA and FBI and agreed to waive a sup­pos­ed­ly con­crete legal dead­line that year to release all clas­si­fied doc­u­ments relat­ed to the JFK assas­si­na­tion.

...

The inter­nal cor­re­spon­dence and emails from the Archives were pro­vid­ed to POLITICO Mag­a­zine by Lar­ry Schnapf, a New York lawyer who filed a fed­er­al law­suit last month against Pres­i­dent Biden and the Nation­al Archives, demand­ing release of all the still-clas­si­fied assas­si­na­tion doc­u­ments. Schnapf, whose clients in the law­suit include the Mary Fer­rell Foun­da­tion, an assas­si­na­tion-research group, obtained the inter­nal cor­re­spon­dence from the Archives under a Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act request.

Even though he is now suing the Nation­al Archives, he said in an inter­view he was impressed by the aggres­sive­ness of Archives offi­cials in try­ing to force the CIA, FBI and oth­er agen­cies to abide by the 1992 law, which called for the declas­si­fi­ca­tion of all assas­si­na­tion-relat­ed doc­u­ments with­in 25 years — a dead­line reached in Octo­ber 2017. The fact that so much infor­ma­tion remains clas­si­fied today “only feeds a lot of the more bizarre con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries” about Kennedy’s death, he said.

...

In 2013, the CIA’s in-house his­to­ri­an con­clud­ed that the spy agency had con­duct­ed a “benign cov­er-up” dur­ing the War­ren Commission’s inves­ti­ga­tion in 1963 and 1964 in hopes of keep­ing the com­mis­sion focused on “what the Agency believed was the ‘best truth’ — that Lee Har­vey Oswald, for as yet unde­ter­mined motives, had act­ed alone in killing John Kennedy.”

Oth­er gov­ern­ment agen­cies have offered dif­fer­ent jus­ti­fi­ca­tions for with­hold­ing infor­ma­tion in the still-clas­si­fied assas­si­na­tion files, the new­ly dis­closed Archives cor­re­spon­dence shows.

The Defense Depart­ment told the Archives in 2018 that it would con­tin­ue to black out por­tions of 256 clas­si­fied Pen­ta­gon doc­u­ments since they iden­ti­fy “active U.S. war plans, for­eign gov­ern­ment infor­ma­tion, sen­si­tive nuclear weapons infor­ma­tion and U.S. pris­on­er of war per­son­al and debrief­ing infor­ma­tion.” Even so, the Pen­ta­gon assured the Archives, “the records iden­ti­fied are not direct­ly relat­ed to the assas­si­na­tion.”

In its 2018 cor­re­spon­dence with the Archives, the State Depart­ment request­ed that por­tions of 31 doc­u­ments be kept secret because of “nation­al secu­ri­ty and for­eign affairs con­cerns,” although it not­ed that “none of the department’s redac­tions relate direct­ly to the JFK assas­si­na­tion.”

The cor­re­spon­dence shows that the Archives, which has housed the assas­si­na­tion records for decades, has long warned the CIA, FBI and oth­er agen­cies that they are fail­ing to abide by require­ments of the 1992 law, which allowed JFK-assas­si­na­tion infor­ma­tion to remain clas­si­fied only if there was “clear and con­vinc­ing evi­dence” of a “sub­stan­tial risk of harm” to nation­al secu­ri­ty or for­eign pol­i­cy.

In a memo in August 2017, William J. Bosanko, chief oper­at­ing offi­cer of the Nation­al Archives, protest­ed the FBI’s deci­sion to con­tin­ue to with­hold the names of con­fi­den­tial sources from the 1960’s, espe­cial­ly those that came direct­ly out of the case files on Oswald and Ruby. “These files clear­ly relate direct­ly to the assas­si­na­tion,” he said. Besides, he not­ed, “it is dif­fi­cult to imag­ine cir­cum­stances under which an indi­vid­ual could be harmed by the release of their name in a file in the JFK col­lec­tion.”

But the protests by the Archives were over­ruled at the last minute by Trump. His deci­sion in Octo­ber 2017 to waive the dead­line sur­prised many in the gov­ern­ment since the for­mer pres­i­dent has been an enthu­si­as­tic con­spir­a­cy the­o­rist for decades, includ­ing about the Kennedy assas­si­na­tion, and had once promised “great trans­paren­cy” in releas­ing the doc­u­ments.

...

Archives offi­cials and oth­ers in the gov­ern­ment have cau­tioned for years that the pub­lic should not expect to find bomb­shells in the still-secret doc­u­ments – at least no bomb­shells that can be eas­i­ly detect­ed. Many of the pre­vi­ous­ly declas­si­fied CIA and FBI files were full of bureau­crat­ic jar­gon, code­names and obscure for­eign names and address­es that made them incom­pre­hen­si­ble at first, even for expe­ri­enced researchers.
...

As the arti­cle also points out, while the 1992 law requir­ing the release of the doc­u­ments has yet to demon­strate con­clu­sive proof of a con­spir­a­cy to kill Kennedy, the doc­u­ments that have been released did reveal just how much evi­dence had been with­held from the War­ren Com­mis­sion. Like evi­dence relat­ed to Oswald’s alleged ‘trip to Mex­i­co City’. A trip that the CIA ini­tial­ly claimed had no evi­dence about. And now we’re learn­ing that some of the still-with­held doc­u­ments are drawn from the CIA sta­tion at the US embassy in Mex­i­co:

...
The 1992 law, the John F. Kennedy Assas­si­na­tion Records Col­lec­tion Act, was adopt­ed by Con­gress in hopes of con­trol­ling a firestorm of con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries whipped up the year before by the release of Oliv­er Stone’s pop­u­lar, con­spir­a­cy-soaked film JFK, which sug­gest­ed Kennedy was killed in a coup d’etat involv­ing his suc­ces­sor, Pres­i­dent Lyn­don John­son. Opin­ion polls have shown con­sis­tent­ly since the late 1960’s that most Amer­i­cans believe there was a con­spir­a­cy in Kennedy’s death — that Oswald, assum­ing he was the assas­sin in Dealey Plaza in Dal­las, did not act alone.

As a result of the law, mil­lions of pages of doc­u­ments were made pub­lic in the 1990’s that rewrote ele­ments of the his­to­ry of the assas­si­na­tion. The declas­si­fied files did not offer con­clu­sive proof of any sort of con­spir­a­cy in the president’s death. But they did reveal how much evi­dence — espe­cial­ly about Oswald — had been with­held by the CIA and FBI from the War­ren Com­mis­sion, the White House pan­el led by Chief Jus­tice Earl War­ren that con­clud­ed in 1964 that Oswald had almost cer­tain­ly act­ed alone.

Some files declas­si­fied as a result of the 1992 law strong­ly sug­gest­ed, for exam­ple, that the CIA’s Mex­i­co City sta­tion cov­ered up evi­dence of its aggres­sive sur­veil­lance of Oswald dur­ing his mys­te­ri­ous trip to the Mex­i­can cap­i­tal just sev­er­al weeks before the assas­si­na­tion, includ­ing the fact that Oswald boast­ed there of his inten­tion to kill Kennedy. The doc­u­ments show that, if the CIA sta­tion in Mex­i­co had act­ed quick­ly on what it learned in Sep­tem­ber and Octo­ber 1963, Kennedy might have sur­vived his trip to Dal­las on Nov. 22. Accord­ing to a bare-bones index at the Archives, sev­er­al of the still-clas­si­fied assas­si­na­tion doc­u­ments are drawn from the files of the U.S. embassy in Mex­i­co — the CIA sta­tion, in par­tic­u­lar.
...

Then there’s the exten­sive clas­si­fi­ca­tion of fig­ures with orga­nized crime ties, with the FBI and DEA and fight­ing par­tic­u­lar­ly hard to keep the iden­ti­ties of any infor­mants clas­si­fied for as long as pos­si­ble. This is a good time to recall the pho­to tak­en just before the assas­si­na­tion that appears to show a smil­ing 24-year old Bar­ry Seal “seat­ed at a night­club table in Mex­i­co City with [Water­gate bur­glar] Frank Stur­gis, [Iran-Con­tra oper­a­tive] Felix Rodriguez, and William Sey­mour, all mem­bers of the CIA’s assas­si­na­tion squad, Oper­a­tion 40.” Any sort of Bar­ry Seal ties to the CIA assas­si­na­tion would obvi­ous­ly be some of the most damn­ing and high­ly sen­si­tive clas­si­fied info the DEA could pos­si­bly pos­sess. It’s a reminder that the rea­sons for the extreme sen­si­tiv­i­ty around these doc­u­ments isn’t just going to be relat­ed to direct fears of hav­ing the assas­si­na­tion plot exposed. There’s all the oth­er tan­gen­tial­ly plots — like decades of CIA-spon­sored major drug-traf­fick­ing — that could be revealed too:

...
The inter­nal cor­re­spon­dence from the Archives helps resolve one lin­ger­ing mys­tery about the doc­u­ments: In their nego­ti­a­tions with the White House and the Archives in recent years, how have the CIA, FBI, the Pen­ta­gon and oth­er agen­cies jus­ti­fied keep­ing any secrets about a turn­ing point in Amer­i­can his­to­ry that occurred decades ago — an event that has always inspired cor­ro­sive con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries about gov­ern­ment com­plic­i­ty?

...

The Archives cor­re­spon­dence reveals, for the first time, their detailed jus­ti­fi­ca­tions, pro­vid­ing a rare win­dow into rea­son­ing inside the CIA and FBI. In many cas­es, it shows, the CIA and FBI pressed to keep doc­u­ments secret because they con­tained the names and per­son­al details of still-liv­ing intel­li­gence and law-enforce­ment infor­mants from the 1960’s and 1970’s who could be at risk of intim­i­da­tion or even vio­lence if they were pub­licly iden­ti­fied.

Many of those sources — now elder­ly, if not close to death — are for­eign­ers liv­ing out­side the Unit­ed States, which means it would be more dif­fi­cult for the Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment to pro­tect them from threats. The CIA has also with­held infor­ma­tion in the doc­u­ments that iden­ti­fies the loca­tion of CIA sta­tions and safe­hous­es abroad, includ­ing sev­er­al that have been in use con­tin­u­ous­ly since Kennedy’s death in 1963.

The Archives cor­re­spon­dence shows that, while much of the still-clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion is only indi­rect­ly relat­ed to the assas­si­na­tion, some of it comes direct­ly from the FBI’s “main inves­tiga­tive case files” about the president’s mur­der. That includes the all-impor­tant case files on Lee Har­vey Oswald, Kennedy’s assas­sin, and Jack Ruby, the Dal­las strip-club own­er who mur­dered Oswald two days after Kennedy’s death.

The Archives paper­work shows that the FBI and Drug Enforce­ment Admin­is­tra­tion have fought par­tic­u­lar­ly hard to pro­tect the iden­ti­ty of infor­mants in orga­nized-crime inves­ti­ga­tions — an argu­ment that will intrigue con­spir­a­cy the­o­rists who believe the Mafia was behind Kennedy’s death. Many assas­si­na­tion researchers argue that the assas­si­na­tion was blow­back for the so-called war on orga­nized crime waged by the president’s broth­er, then-Attor­ney Gen­er­al Robert Kennedy.

In fact, the cor­re­spon­dence shows the over­whelm­ing major­i­ty of the doc­u­ments that the FBI has with­held from the pub­lic in recent years some­how involved orga­nized-crime inves­ti­ga­tions. Of the near­ly 7,500 doc­u­ments that the FBI kept clas­si­fied at the time of the 2017 dead­line, 6,000 were from “var­i­ous files of mem­bers of orga­nized crime or La Cosa Nos­tra.”

The DEA made a spe­cial plea to black out the names of six con­fi­den­tial infor­mants iden­ti­fied in assas­si­na­tion-relat­ed files involv­ing orga­nized-crime inves­ti­ga­tions: “Giv­en the well-doc­u­ment­ed propen­si­ty for vio­lence by the Mafia, it is rea­son­able to expect the indi­vid­u­als, if alive, remain in sig­nif­i­cant dan­ger of retal­i­a­tion for their assis­tance,” the agency said in a 2018 let­ter to the Archives.
...

Final­ly, there’s the lat­est promise to final­ly get all these remain­ing doc­u­ments declas­si­fied. Decem­ber 15 is the next due date. But it sounds like the exact same excus­es that pre­vent­ed the release of these doc­u­ments could still apply:

...
Last year, Pres­i­dent Joe Biden ordered anoth­er review of the doc­u­ments to allow more to be made pub­lic this Decem­ber. Offi­cials involved in the declas­si­fi­ca­tion process say they are opti­mistic that a large batch of doc­u­ments will be made pub­lic next month.

...

Under the 1992 law, only the sit­ting pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States has the pow­er to with­hold doc­u­ments beyond the 2017 dead­line, which means the pow­er now rests entire­ly with Pres­i­dent Biden. Last Octo­ber, Biden ordered the archives to begin a com­pre­hen­sive review of the still-clas­si­fied records, with a goal of releas­ing as many as pos­si­ble by a new dead­line of this Dec. 15.

But his writ­ten order dis­ap­point­ed many his­to­ri­ans and assas­si­na­tion researchers since Biden, like Trump, left open the pos­si­bil­i­ty that some doc­u­ments will remain clas­si­fied for­ev­er. Biden’s order, draw­ing on the word­ing of the 1992 law, said he would allow doc­u­ments to be with­held if their release might do “iden­ti­fi­able harm” to “mil­i­tary defense, intel­li­gence oper­a­tions, law enforce­ment, or the con­di­tion of for­eign rela­tions that is of such grav­i­ty that it out­weighs the pub­lic inter­est in dis­clo­sure.”

The Nation­al Archives said in a state­ment to POLITICO Mag­a­zine that it had recent­ly com­plet­ed its review of the still-clas­si­fied mate­r­i­al and pro­vid­ed its rec­om­men­da­tions to Pres­i­dent Biden about which doc­u­ments should be released on Dec. 15.

Bosanko, the Archives offi­cial over­see­ing the project, said in an inter­view that the recent inter­a­gency review of the JFK doc­u­ments had been the most inten­sive in decades, involv­ing a page-to-page inspec­tion, with the CIA, FBI and oth­er agen­cies pressed to jus­ti­fy why any infor­ma­tion — includ­ing indi­vid­ual names and address­es — should con­tin­ue to be with­held from the pub­lic: “We looked at every sin­gle redac­tion in these doc­u­ments.” He said his team is con­tin­u­ing to nego­ti­ate with the CIA and oth­er agen­cies this month in hopes of con­vinc­ing them — before the Dec. 15 dead­line set by the White House — to lift their oppo­si­tion to releas­ing some of the still-clas­si­fied mate­r­i­al.

...

And no mat­ter what Biden decides, about 500 doc­u­ments and oth­er items in the col­lec­tion will remain secret, since the 1992 law exempts them from pub­lic release. Among them are doc­u­ments pro­duced by fed­er­al grand juries and by the Inter­nal Rev­enue Ser­vice, includ­ing the tax and employ­ment records of Oswald, Ruby and many of their asso­ciates.
...

So are they wait­ing for every­one involved to have passed? Or wait­ing for democ­ra­cy and any form of pub­lic account­abil­i­ty to have passed? Either way, we’ll see how many doc­u­ments are indeed released next month. And how many new excus­es get deployed but why it is once again a major dis­ap­point­ment. A very guilty-look­ing major dis­ap­point­ment.