Secret government documents related to the 1963 assassination of former President John F. Kennedy were released by the National Archives on Thursday, though not in full as scholars have long hoped.
More than 70% of the nearly 16,000 records that had previously been released, but in redacted form, were uploaded without redactions to the National Archives website, the White House announced.
The National Archives said 13,173 documents were made available for download. That number was updated from an initially announced 12,879 documents, following “last minute additions,” it said.
It’s unclear whether there will be any major surprises in the documents. Rex Bradford, president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to preserving and releasing the documents, expressed initial concern at the redactions in the new trove.
“The amount of documents released may look impressive,” he said at a press conference Thursday following the records’ release. “But at least spot-checking, there are a lot of documents released with similar redactions to what there were before, sometimes slightly less.”
Bradford said he hoped to have a firmer answer Friday about what is new in the documents, after the group has had more time to review the voluminous records.
“We’re still peeling back the layers of the onion on these stories, bit by bit,” he said.
The documents’ ordered release follows the completion of a review by the National Archives and other executive departments and agencies to determine whether their full release could jeopardize military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement or the conduct of foreign relations.
“In the course of their review, agencies have identified a limited number of records containing information for continued postponement of public disclosure,” President Joe Biden, who issued a moratorium on their release last year, said in a statement Thursday.
“I hereby certify that continued postponement of public disclosure of these records is necessary to protect against an identifiable harm ... [that] outweighs the public interest in disclosure,” he added.
The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection, which was established by the National Archives in 1992, consists of 5 million pages related to his killing.
“The vast majority of the collection has been publicly available without restrictions on access since the late 1990s. Following today’s release, over 97% of records in the collection are now available,” the National Archives said in a statement.
For the files that remain redacted, the full versions will continue to be held until June 30, pending any additional concerns raised by the National Archives, Biden said.
This delay came at the recommendation of the acting archivist, according to the president, who advised that additional time spent reviewing the files “could further reduce the amount of redacted information.”
The files’ release follows repeat postponements, first by former President Donald Trump and then Biden, which critics said violated a 1992 Act that mandated their full release by 2017.
The National Archives had said that it would release the final batch of files on Thursday at the conclusion of Biden’s moratorium. His moratorium stated that the files would be published, pending a security review, on Dec. 15 “except when the strongest possible reasons counsel otherwise.”
Trump similarly withheld the declassification of hundreds of the files in 2017, despite the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act requiring their full, public release that year. The act included an exception should the files’ release harm intelligence, law enforcement, military operations or foreign relations.
The act, signed by Bush in 1992, aimed to dismiss conspiracy theories that have long swirled about Kennedy’s death. Congress reasoned that by 2017, 54 years after his assassination, “only in the rarest of cases” would there be any legitimate need to protect the information in the files.
Researchers and historians have argued that releasing the files is a matter of public importance and that it could help eliminate or minimize conspiracy theories, including of a government cover-up and whether Lee Harvey Oswald was in fact the one, and only one, who fatally shot Kennedy. Oswald was shortly after killed by Jack Ruby, a mob-connected nightclub owner.
An investigation by the so-called Warren Commission, which was established in 1963 to investigate Kennedy’s death, concluded that Oswald acted alone in the shooting, though a later investigation by the House Select Committee on Assassinations found “high probability that two gunmen fired at President Kennedy.”
The Mary Ferrell Foundation, a research organization that boasts the largest collection of online records related to Kennedy’s death and sued Biden and the National Archives in October over the files’ delay, has also raised questions about Oswald’s past and what the CIA knew about him before Kennedy’s killing.
Ryan Grenoble contributed reporting.