Trump To Allow Release Of 3,000 Never Before Seen Documents On JFK Assassination
by Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge.com
Oct 21, 2017
Following years of delays, President Trump announced on Twitter on Saturday morning that he will allow the release of more than 3,000 of classified documents from the FBI, CIA, and Justice Department on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The unexpected announcement means that a trove of previously unseen documents will be released by the National Archives by October 26.
“Subject to the receipt of further information, I will be allowing, as President, the long blocked and classified JFK FILES to be opened,” Trump tweeted.
In 1992, Congress mandated that all assassination documents be released within 25 years, unless the president asserts that doing so would harm intelligence, law enforcement, military operations or foreign relations. The still-secret documents include more than 3,000 that have never been seen by the public and more than 30,000 that have been released previously, but with redactions, according to CBS. Trump’s decision means that thousands of formerly classified documents related to Kennedy’s assassination will be unveiled next week in compliance with the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, which states that the federal government must release them by Oct. 26, 2017.
JFK scholars hope the new documents may provide insight into assassin Lee Harvey Oswald’s trip to Mexico City weeks before the killing, during which he visited the Soviet and Cuban embassies. Oswald’s stated reason for going was to get visas that would allow him to enter Cuba and the Soviet Union, according to the Warren Commission, the investigative body established by President Lyndon B. Johnson, but much about the trip remains unknown.
Among other protected information slated for release are details about the arrangements the U.S. entered into with the Mexican government that allowed it to have close surveillance of those and other embassies, said Tunheim, a federal judge in Minnesota. Jefferson Morley, a former Washington Post reporter who has written extensively about the Kennedy assassination papers, said the remaining documents might include files on senior CIA officers from the 1960s who likely knew details of the agency’s surveillance of Oswald in Mexico City.
“What’s in those files could tell us how those men did their jobs,” said Morley, who wrote a 2008 book on the agency’s Mexico City station chief. “Is there JFK material in there? Could be. There might be stuff on why we were interested in the Cuban consulate, how we surveilled the consulate, how we did our audio work, and how did we recruit spies there? We might understand much better why they were watching Oswald.”
Morley is also eager to read a never-before released transcript of testimony given by James Angleton, the CIA’s legendary chief of counterintelligence from 1954 to 1975, to senators in September 1975 investigating abuses committed by the intelligence community.
The files on Angleton and the other CIA officers are important because “these are not just major players in the agency’s history, they are major players in the Oswald story,” said Morley, who has a new book on Angleton, “The Ghost,” coming out Oct. 24. “Oswald didn’t come out of nowhere. Angelton was targeting him for intelligence purposes at the Cuban consulate in Mexico City.”
Not everyone is happy, however, and many experts fear that such a large release of secret JFK assassination documents will spur “a new generation of conspiracy theories.”
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