The still-secret records are contained in 14,000 pages of documents the FBI found in a review triggered by President Trump‘s Jan. 23 executive order demanding the release of all JFK assassination records.
The discovery — 61 years after Kennedy was killed in Dallas — follows decades of government reluctance to release all documents related to the assassination, which fueled a mountain of conspiracy theories.
The existence of the new documents was disclosed Friday to the White House, when the Office of the Director of National Intelligence submitted its plan to disclose the assassination records under Trump’s order.
The contents of the newly found records are closely held secrets. The three sources who relayed their existence to Axios said they hadn’t seen the documents.
Note The FBI just discovered about 2,400 records tied to President Kennedy’s assassination that were never provided to a board tasked with reviewing and disclosing the documents, Axios has learned.
“This is huge. It shows the FBI is taking this seriously,” said Jefferson Morley, an expert on the assassination and vice president of the nonpartisan Mary Ferrell Foundation, the nation’s largest source of online records of Kennedy’s killing. He sued the U.S. government for more records.
“The FBI is finally saying, ‘Let’s respond to the president’s order,’ instead of keeping the secrecy going,” Morley said.
Under the 1992 JFK Records Act, assassination records were supposed to be handed over to the JFK Assassination Records Review Board and then to the National Archives. The archive maintains a collection of documents that were supposed to be fully disclosed in 2017.
Administration officials determined these newly discovered records hadn’t been submitted to or vetted by the assassination review board or the National Archives.
When Trump was president in 2017, he delayed disclosure of the records the government had identified, on the advice of the CIA. President Biden then ordered limited releases of records that still didn’t fully comply with the spirit of the JFK Records Act.
Government secrecy advocates argued to Trump and Biden that full disclosure of the assassination documents could compromise “sources and methods” of intelligence gathering, and unfairly implicate officials involved in the controversy.
The remaining records to be disclosed — as well as the newly discovered tranche of 2,400 reports — are unlikely to definitively prove whether Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone-wolf assassin or was part of a broader conspiracy, experts say.
Trump’s order calls for a plan to release assassination records of RFK and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. by March 9.
“PRESIDENT TRUMP IS ENDING THE ENDLESS DELAYS,” a White House fact sheet issued Jan. 23 says: “President Trump promised during his campaign to release assassination records to give Americans the truth.”
What’s next: Despite Trump’s order, sources say, the various intelligence agencies with records of the assassination are still recommending redactions.
