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.
- 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.
Why it matters: 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.
Zoom in: 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.
- But the discovery of thousands of records on one of the most scrutinized events in U.S. history is likely to raise questions about the procedures for vetting and releasing information across the entire government.
- “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.
Reality check: 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.
Hellbound and Down 