FBI finds thousands of secret records on Kennedy's assassination following Trump's order - Axios
The secret records are contained in 14,000 pages of documents (Illustratove photo: Getty Images)
On January 23, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order to declassify documents related to the assassination of the 35th president of the US, John F. Kennedy. The FBI has already discovered about 2,400 records that were never provided to the commission responsible for reviewing and releasing the documents, reports Axios.
Axios reports that the still-secret records are contained in 14,000 pages of documents the FBI discovered during a review conducted after Trump's executive order. This discovery, made 61 years after Kennedy's assassination in Dallas, is the result of decades of government reluctance to release all documents related to the murder, which has fueled numerous conspiracy theories.
The White House learned about the new documents on Friday when the Office of the Director of National Intelligence presented its plan for declassifying the records about the assassination.
The contents of the recently discovered records are highly classified. Three sources who informed Axios of their existence said they had not seen the documents. However, the discovery of thousands of records about one of the most thoroughly studied events in US history is likely to raise questions about the verification and disclosure procedures across the government.
According to experts, the remaining records to be declassified, along with the recently discovered series of 2,400 reports, are unlikely to definitively prove whether Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone assassin or part of a larger conspiracy.
Axios recalled that when Trump was president in 2017, he postponed the release of records discovered by the government, following advice from the CIA. Later, US President Joe Biden ordered restrictions on the publication of records that still did not fully meet the spirit of the JFK Records Act.
Three sources who discussed the matter with Trump told Axios that he had regretted for years not releasing all the documents related to the Kennedy case during his first term.
Axios also added that Trump's current order includes a plan to release records on the murders of Robert Kennedy and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. by March 9.
However, despite the order, various intelligence agencies holding records on the assassinations continue to recommend redacting the documents.
Additionally, the recently discovered FBI files may be linked to an ongoing lawsuit filed by the Mary Ferrel Foundation against the Biden administration in 2022. The lawsuit claims that federal agencies held more documents related to the assassination that they failed to hand over to the National Archives. These documents include:
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Jailhouse recordings of mobster Carlos Marcello, who claimed he was involved in the assassination.
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CIA files of George Joannides. He was the chief of covert action at the CIA station in Miami and was a case officer for a New Orleans-based CIA-funded exile group that had a series of encounters with Oswald before the shooting. Joannides also was accused of misleading a House committee investigating the assassination by failing to disclose his ties to Oswald.
Trump's executive order on declassifying documents
The White House officially announced the signing of the order to declassify documents regarding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in the 1960s.
"More than 50 years after the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Federal Government has not released to the public all of its records related to those events," states Trump's executive order of January 23, 2025.
