The officials arrived at the secret CIA archival facility in the Washington area one morning in early April. Their mission: to seize still-classified CIA files on the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.
The team pulled up in their vehicles unannounced, catching the spy agency off-guard, three people familiar with the matter told Reuters.
They were acting on behalf of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who wanted to take documents out of the hands of the Central Intelligence Agency and start the process of declassifying them at the National Archives, the people said.
One of the people familiar with the matter said the CIA wasn’t aware that it was about to receive direction that day “from a higher government agency.” The person also described the moment as probably the most confrontational point in the still young relationship between Gabbard’s office and the CIA.
The official leading the search, a Defense Intelligence Agency official named Paul Allen McDonald II who was on temporary assignment to Gabbard’s office, declared that they were “on a mission” from Gabbard, two of the people said.
A Trump administration official who made a brief appearance that day after arriving in her minivan, Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, was a CIA veteran herself and the daughter-in-law of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. She did not have the necessary badge to access the warehouse but was waved in, the two people said. One said Fox Kennedy spent about an hour there, focusing on efforts to digitize the massive archive of papers.
The early April episode, which has not been previously reported, lasted until 2 a.m. the next morning when a massive trove of documents was eventually transferred to the National Archives, according to two of the people.
The case casts new light on the tension between two forces in Washington, the CIA and Gabbard’s ODNI, as Trump appointees sought to act on the president’s orders to swiftly release the full accounting of Kennedy’s murder in 1963, as well as the high-profile 1968 assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.
White House spokesman Steven Cheung said Trump had full confidence in both Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe. “Efforts by the legacy media to sow internal division are a distraction that will not work,” Cheung said.
A spokesperson for the Director of National Intelligence said the ODNI “has worked in close coordination with the CIA since the beginning of the administration to carry out this historic release of files.”
Trump issued an executive order in January instructing Gabbard and the other intelligence agencies to declassify records related to the JFK, RFK and Martin Luther King Jr. assassinations.
Reuters could not independently determine if Gabbard directed this specific mission at the archives or the extent to which Trump may have been briefed ahead of time about individual missions related to the declassification effort.
The Director of National Intelligence serves as principal intelligence adviser to the president and has oversight over the 17 other agencies, including the CIA. The job typically includes managing interagency tensions.
In a joint statement, Gabbard’s ODNI and the CIA said the two agencies “have and will continue working hand-in-hand to release and declassify documents of public interest and execute President Trump’s mission of restoring trust in the intelligence community.”
Hellbound and Down 