How to Find Out Who Killed JFK

What actually happened that fall day in Dealey Plaza in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, has turned into a generational question. 

The full account of events that culminated in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy has been kept hidden from the American public for more than 60 years. Now, however, President Donald Trump is on the verge of declassifying what other administrations—even his own first term—refused or declined to make public.

Not only has Trump promised to declassify documents pertaining to the JFK assassination, but also the 1968 assassinations of his brother, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr.

Craig Iffland is an independent researcher with a Ph.D. in Moral Theology from Notre Dame. He is more knowledgeable about the JFK assassination, what we know and what we don’t yet know, than anyone I’ve ever met. Daily Signal readers may have become acquainted with Iffland by reading a recently published Daily Signal article, “Here’s How We Find Out Who Killed JFK.”

This week, he joins me on “The Signal Sitdown” to not only discuss Trump’s effort to bring transparency to the assassinations, but also revisit what happened on Nov. 22, 1963 and the years leading up to that fateful day.

While Trump has already issued an executive order to formulate plans to declassify details about the assassinations, more intelligence agency obstruction could lie ahead. 

“In terms of intelligence agencies, they don’t want people to know what they’re doing right as part of their security measures. So, any kind of yielding to public transparency kind of weakens their ability to keep things secret and sets up a precedent for them to not be able to continue to make things secret in the future,” Iffland told me.

“Of course, the first route to holding anyone accountable is that you know what they’re doing,” he said. “So, it’s kind of absurd and ridiculous that for over 60 years, we’ve created this culture in Washington where folks within the intelligence community can shield their activities from public review, and therefore, public accountability.”

For example, “there’s a lot of documents outstanding that [could] help us understand what the CIA knew about Lee Harvey Oswald prior to the assassination that we just don’t know about. Part of the problem is that they say, ‘We have to wait until people die,’” Iffland continued. “Well, part of the problem with that is, once people are dead, you can’t ask them, ‘Why did you do that?’”

“If you’re part of the executive branch and you’re working there, you can’t expect complete and total anonymity 60 years after the fact,” Iffland told me.

“And sometimes waiting until people die is not about protecting their anonymity. It’s about us not knowing. You know, they don’t want the public to know who might have known certain things that could reveal further leads or other things that we could know about what the CIA knew about the assassination.”

But for the full story on what we know, and what we don’t know, about Oswald, the CIA, the JFK assassination, and previous failed attempts at declassification, you’ll have to watch the episode.

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