A research organization that boasts the largest collection of online records related to John F. Kennedy’s assassination is suing President Joe Biden and the National Archives over files about the former president’s 1963 killing.
The Mary Ferrell Foundation filed a federal lawsuit in San Francisco on Wednesday accusing Biden and the National Archives and Records Administration, or NARA, of unlawfully withholding documents about Kennedy’s assassination in violation of a 1992 Act that mandated their full release by 2017.
“It’s high time that the government got its act together and obeyed the spirit and the letter of the law,” the nonprofit’s vice president, Jefferson Morley, told NBC News. “This is about our history and our right to know it.”
The so-called JFK Records Act, signed by President George H.W. Bush in 1992, greenlit the files’ full, public release within 25 years in an effort to dismiss conspiracy theories and claims that the U.S. government had something to hide. Congress reasoned that by 2017, 54 years after Kennedy’s death, “only in the rarest of cases” would there be any legitimate need to protect the information in the files.
But the files’ long-anticipated release was partially stalled by President Donald Trump, who ordered a fraction of them to be withheld, citing national security concerns. Biden then pushed back their release again last year. His administration blamed the pandemic for snarling NARA’s ability to determine whether the material could harm national security if released.
The current moratorium on releasing the files is slated to last until Dec. 15. It states that the documents will be released “except when the strongest possible reasons counsel otherwise.”
A NARA representative told HuffPost on Wednesday that NARA and other pertinent agencies have completed a review of the JFK documents as part of Biden’s moratorium and shared their findings with the president. “The results of those reviews will be made public in December, in accordance with the memo,” the representative said.
The Mary Ferrell Foundation’s lawsuit calls the moratorium unlawful and argues that the failure to disclose approximately 15,000 records deprives researchers and historians of their ability to learn about the assassination.
It demands the files’ immediate release or an unclassified explanation for why some documents should continue to be withheld if that is the administration’s decision. This explanation should include “clear and convincing evidence” of how the files’ release could create harm and how this harm outweighs the public interest in disclosure, according to the lawsuit.
The White House did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s requests for comment on Wednesday.