Experts who have been studying the assassination of President John F. Kennedy for decades told ABC News Friday that they expect that president Donald Trump will see the release of government documents about the assassination that have been withheld from the public.
However, despite the president’s order on Thursday directing a plan for the “full and complete release” of the material, prominent researchers are not holding their breath.
“This order is a good first step, but in it, the author of Jefferson Morley” warns, he warns to “overturn” the official secrecy surrounding the 1963 murder.
Pointing to Trump’s executive order calling for a “plan” for the breach, Morley Fear dragged the intelligence community into more than 3,600 documents that are still redacted in the collections of the National Archives.
“These agencies have not cooperated with the law, Congress or anyone for the last 60 years,” Morley said. “Resistance to full disclosure won’t stop because Trump orders it.”
President John F. Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, Texas Governor John Connally, and others smile above the crowd in Dallas on November 22, 1963.
Bettmann Archive / Getty Images
-A The order Trump signed on Thursday directs a plan within 15 days to the “full and complete release” of JFK-related material, and within 45 days of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. to obtain information about the murders.
New York lawyer Larry Schnapf sued the government to force the release of the JFK documents, saying years of experience with a reluctant national security apparatus informs his skepticism.
“We expect this to be a mechanical plan,” Schnapf said. “But if they were going to review the substantive (documentary document), then it will be a short time before the records are released.”
Schnapf also worries that shortfalls by Trump appointees in key roles at the intelligence agencies could slow down the explanation.
“If (Trump) doesn’t get his people within 15 days, I think we’re going to have an initial delay anyway,” Schnapf said.
In this November 22, 1963 file photo, President John F. Kennedy is seen at a news conference after the arrest of President Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas.
Stringer/AFP via Getty Images
In 1992, Congress forced the release of the JFK documents in 2017. But the law also allowed exceptions if the president could ascertain “identified harm” to national security if the secrets were revealed. Even releasing tens of thousands of pages, Donald Trump and Joe Biden have given concerns from the CIA, FBI and other agencies that thousands of documents must be redacted again.
The White House’s December 2022 memo was writing “restricted redactions” of key official CIA data necessary to keep secret the names of CIA personnel, intelligence assets, sources and methods, as well as the still-classified shield Action programs still in place. “
Jefferson Morley calls that ship.
“The idea that the techniques were used in an Oswald operation today and therefore should be kept secret is absurd,” Morley said.
Author Gerald Posner, who wrote the 1993 book, “Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK,” is second only to Morley and Schnapf around the time of the premieres.
“(Trump) doesn’t like being humiliated or having to pretend there’s a limit to his power,” Posner said. “And if (the agencies) come back and want to keep things this time, they’re going to have a tougher road ahead.”
Posner and other experts agree that the CIA is embarrassed by its defenders, as the redacted documents are supposed to follow the spy agency’s surveillance of Kennedy’s death in 1959, when Oswald traveled to Mexico City with a plan to defect to communist Cuba.
“In an ideal world, we would have gotten to the bottom of that story under surveillance, under Oswald’s surveillance, about the CIA operations surrounding Oswald, as he did toward Dallas,” Morley said of the CIA file “The Key to the Story.”
A key release, he is aiming for a seat at Trump’s cabinet table, hoping to learn more from government records about his father’s 1968 murders.
“The 60-year strategy of lies and secrecy, disinformation, censorship and defamation to hide and suppress the confusing facts surrounding JFK’s assassination. Statement pointing to the murders of RFK and MLK, the war in Vietnam and Iraq, 9/11 and government manipulation of Covid-19.
“(E)ACH accelerated the subversion of our model democracy by the military/medical industrial complex and has pushed us down the road once again,” Kennedy said.
