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President Donald Trump’s administration released thousands of classified documents related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, but researchers say the trove excluded two-thirds of the promised files.
On his third day in office, Trump ordered a “full and complete release of all John F. Kennedy assassination records,” with researchers anticipating some 3,500 documents that had never been shared with the public.
The highly anticipated document dump happened Tuesday — but some experts say that only a third of the redacted files were released.
One of those experts is Jefferson Morley, the vice president at the Mary Ferrell Foundation, a database on the JFK assassination files.
Tuesday’s release is “an encouraging start,” Morley posted on X late Tuesday. But he also noted that only approximately 1,124 of the withheld documents had been released. The tranche didn’t include two-thirds of the promised files, any of the 500 IRS records or the recently discovered FBI files, he noted.
Last month, the FBI said it had found about 2,400 records relating to the assassination.
“Nonetheless, this is the most positive news on the declassification of JFK files since the 1990s,” Morley continued.
“These long-secret records shed new light on JFK’s mistrust of the CIA, the Castro assassination plots, the surveillance of Oswald in Mexico City, and CIA propaganda operations involving Oswald,” he said.
The release of the records regarding Kennedy, who was assassinated during a visit to Dallas, could potentially put an end to the many conspiracy theories that have surrounded his death for decades.
“People have been waiting for decades for this,” Trump said Monday at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. “We have a tremendous amount of paper. You’ve got a lot of reading. I don’t believe we’re going to redact anything.”
The files described 24-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald — who was arrested for the assassination but killed before he was tried — as a “poor shot.”
Larry J. Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics and author of “The Kennedy Half-Century,” told the Associated Press that reviewing the released records will take some time.
“We have a lot of work to do for a long time to come, and people just have to accept that,” Sabato said.
