The Justice Department’s National Security Division has been in a scramble trying to meet President Donald Trump’s promise on Monday to release declassified information from the JFK assassination investigation today.
Trump, during a visit Monday to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, announced the government would be releasing all the files on Kennedy’s assassination on Tuesday afternoon.
Less than half an hour after that announcement, the Justice Department’s office that handles foreign surveillance requests and other intelligence-related operations began to shift resources to focus on the task, sources said.
In an email just before 5 p.m. ET Monday, a senior official within DOJ’s Office of Intelligence said that even though the FBI had already conducted “an initial declassification review” of the documents, “all” of the attorneys in the operations section now had to provide “a second set of eyes” to help with this “urgent NSD-wide project.”
Eventually, however, it was other National Security Division attorneys who ended up having to help, sources said.
Attorneys from across the division were up throughout the night, into the early morning hours, each reading through as many as hundreds of pages of documents, sources said. Only prosecutors with an impending arrest or other imminent work did not have to help, sources said.
Hellbound and Down 