Here’s How We Find Out Who Killed JFK

“The most transparent president in history is back,” a Jan. 20 post on X from White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt read.

Never was that more clear than on Jan. 23, when President Donald Trump signed an executive order stating that the “continued redaction and withholding of information from records pertaining to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy is not consistent with the public interest, and the release of these records is long overdue.”

Trump is now a singular public figure in the push for complete government transparency on the assassination, and his executive order is nothing short of historic; however, the devil is in the details.

The Jan. 23 executive order directs government officials—specifically, the director of national intelligence and the attorney general, in coordination with the national security adviser and the president’s counsel—to propose a plan for declassification of those records rather than directing government agencies to declassify outstanding assassination-related records. That’s because certain government agencies have an interest in stalling or completely stopping declassification.

The timeline for the submission of a plan for declassification and release of records is ambitious: 15 days from the date of the executive order, which would be Feb. 7. For point of reference, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted on advancing Trump’s nominee for attorney general, Pam Bondi, on Wednesday, and hearings for Trump’s nominee for the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, were Thursday.

If Trump intends to put Bondi and Gabbard in charge of the declassification plan—and there is no doubt that a successful declassification plan will require each of them to implement it (particularly Gabbard)—they will have precious little time to formulate it.

Fortunately, the president’s team has precedent for a process of declassification of assassination records that operated with tremendous success in the past.

In 1992, Congress passed the JFK Act, which stated that all government records related to the JFK assassination carried a “presumption of immediate disclosure” and authorized the creation of the Assassination Records Review Board, which facilitated the identification, and ultimately, declassification, of government records related to the assassination.

Specifically, the review board was granted three important powers: (1) to determine whether a government record is assassination-related, (2) to compel government agencies to search for additional assassination-related records, and (3) to override requests by government agencies to postpone the declassification of records.

The board was not your ordinary, buck-passing government office. The JFK Act mandated that members of the review board be experts in the history of the assassination and not be “presently employed by any branch of the government.” While this sounds like granting powers to a group of unelected individuals, in this case, it is a perfectly sensible and necessary countermeasure.

Enshrining in law that review board members could not be employed by the government ensured that declassification decisions would not be made by members of the intelligence community who, for good or for ill, have the most to gain from the perpetual classification of these records.

Therefore, the public could have reasonable assurance that declassification decisions and the prompt disclosure of assassination records were being made in its compelling interest—as opposed to the interest of shadowy government bureaucracies.

By the time of its dissolution in 1998 due to lack of funding, the board had reviewed and released over 4 million pages of documents to the public. Yet, the board had also agreed with the request of some government agencies to postpone the release of some documents until the mandated deadline of Oct. 26, 2017.

To postpone further would require a certification, made by the president, stating that continued postponement is necessary due to “clear and convincing evidence” that the disclosure of records would pose an “identifiable harm” to “military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations” that is “of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure.”

Unfortunately, the dissolution of the review board, and with it, the loss of the powers enumerated above, left advocates for full government transparency on the JFK assassination without a crucial mechanism to compel full and complete declassification of outstanding assassination-related records. No longer facing an independent review board devoted to complete government transparency on the assassination, government agencies have been able to convince both Trump and President Joe Biden for successive delays in declassification beyond the October 2017 deadline.

Despite the review board’s success, there are still approximately 3,500 outstanding assassination-related records to date, the majority of which are records of the Central Intelligence Agency.

In 2023, however, Biden took the extraordinary step of divesting himself, and by extension, the Office of the President, of any further decision-making with respect to declassification of these records. Instead, he directed government agencies to formulate “transparency plans” that stipulate specific “events” that will “trigger” a declassification review.

Under these newly formulated transparency plans, what sort of events would “trigger” a declassification review? One such “event” would be the formal dissolution of “partnerships or diplomatic relationships.” So, if one wishes to know specific details about how the CIA’s station in Mexico City surveilled Lee Harvey Oswald during his visit there in late September 1963, one may have to wait until our government formally dissolves diplomatic ties with the state of Mexico.

Or suppose one wishes to know specific details of the CIA’s use of the Directorio Revolucionario Estudantil, a militant group of Cuban exiles devoted to the overthrow of Fidel Castro, for “psychological warfare” operations in the summer of 1963 when members of that group interacted extensively with Oswald. According to the CIA’s transparency plan, the “condition” for public disclosure of those operational details is that said details are “generally known by the public” and the agency completes a “risk assessment” determining that disclosure would not pose a “high risk of harm to CIA sources, methods, and liaison relationships.” But if the details of a CIA operation are already public knowledge, what is there left to disclose?

While it may appear that the aim of these “transparency plans” is to secure indefinite postponement of declassification, the true purpose is something more fundamental: control. Above all, the intelligence agencies want to maintain control over future declassification decisions regarding assassination records.

The goal of these “transparency plans,” and the Biden order to enact them, was to secure “deep state” independence from future presidents like Trump, who advocate for full and complete transparency on the assassination. These “transparency” plans not only wrestle authority over declassification from the duly elected president but also are designed to do the exact opposite of what their name entails: They facilitate secrecy, not transparency.

To reassert Trump’s authority over the process of declassification, any “plan” for declassification should begin with a presidential directive that explicitly revokes Biden’s “transparency plans.”

More generally, what kind of “plan” should Trump implement to ensure true transparency—i.e., the “full and complete release of records relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy?” As attorney Larry Schnapf, an expert on the JFK Act, has recently argued, the most critical part of any future “plan” of declassification would be to create an independent review board within the Office of the President that has the same powers as the now-defunct Assassination Records Review Board.

Before explaining why an independent review board is necessary, a distinction must be made. When people speak colloquially about releasing the “JFK files,” they are usually talking about the approximately 3,500 redacted documents contained in the National Archives. Any order to declassify the “JFK files” would only apply to those documents. Yet, it is public knowledge that there are assassination-related records that are not deemed part of the JFK collection contained in the National Archives but that shouldbe.

To support this contention, two examples should suffice.

First, it is now public knowledge that the Directorio Revolucionario Estudantil was involved in psychological warfare operations directed by a CIA agent named George Joannides during the summer of 1963 when the Directorio Revolucionario Estudantil engaged in a series of highly public interactions with Oswald. What remains unknown, and what the CIA has “denied in full,” is the content of over 40 documents relating to Joannides’ work in “psychological warfare,” including 17 monthly reports of his work with the group that spans from December 1962 to April 1964. These documents are not currently part of the JFK collection held at the National Archives and, therefore, would not be subject to any declassification order regarding the collection.

Second, it is now public knowledge that the CIA, in the immediate aftermath of the assassination, instructed its field agents in Miami “to search for informational leads which might turn up an exile Cuban conspiratorial group possibly involved in the assassination.”

According to an internal memo by a CIA officer involved in this investigation, the CIA station in Miami produced daily situation reports—from November 1963 to March 1964—containing information relating to the results of this investigation. Although the author of this memo provided specific instructions for how to locate these documents, they have never surfaced, and they are not part of the JFK collection at the National Archives.

To achieve full transparency on the assassination, the CIA should not withhold records documenting its own investigation into the possibility of a conspiracy to kill Kennedy.

Any declassification plan submitted to Trump should include a mechanism by which these documents, and others like them, can be located and promptly disclosed to the public.

To achieve this, Trump should create a review board modeled on the original Assassination Records Review Board that has the power to (1) determine whether a government record is assassination-related, (2) compel government agencies to search for additional assassination-related records, (3) override those same agencies requests for postponement, and most importantly, (4) whose membership consists of individuals who are completely independent of the intelligence community.

Without each of these four elements, any “plan” of declassification is likely to devolve, as it did after the dissolution of the original review board, into a complex scheme of agency obfuscation masquerading as transparency.

Such a plan seems to have bipartisan support in Congress. A recent letter from members of Congress made clear that if Trump wishes to avoid continued stonewalling on the release of assassination related records, his “plan” for declassification should revoke the absurd “transparency” plans enacted by Biden. He should also direct the National Archives to remove all redactions and publicly release the approximately 3,500 JFK documents slated for perpetual postponement. Finally, he should create a review board comprised of members outside the government and independent of the intelligence community and invest the board with the same powers as the original Assassination Records Review Board.

If Trump enacts such a plan, he will not only put much decades-old speculation about Kennedy’s assassination to rest but he will also take a monumental step in favor of government transparency and earn himself a very special place in the annals of American history.

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