The assassination of John F Kennedy has long been a subject of intrigue and speculation.
The former U.S. president was assassinated in 1963 during a visit to Dallas, Texas, accompanied by his wife Jacqueline Kennedy.
Lee Harvey Oswald, a 24-year-old former Marine, was arrested and charged with Kennedy’s murder. The official conclusion was that he acted alone.
Despite this conclusion, numerous conspiracy theories have emerged regarding JFK’s assassination.
Some theories suggest Oswald was set up and that there was a second shooter involved, while others question the plausibility of the ‘magic bullet’ theory, which claims Oswald’s bullet went through Kennedy’s neck and hit Texas Governor John Connally Jr.
The Warren Commission, established by President Lyndon B. Johnson, conducted an investigation into JFK’s death in the year following the incident.
In the early 1990s, it was mandated by the federal government that all documents related to the assassination (estimated to be around five million files) be stored in a single collection at the National Archives and Records Administration, as reported by AP.
This collection was scheduled to be made public by 2017, barring a presidential intervention.
When Trump assumed office in 2017, he permitted the release of many records but withheld some documents.
The stated reason for withholding these documents was that releasing them posed a threat to national security.
According to POLITICO, Trump supported the FBI and CIA’s long-standing efforts to keep certain documents sealed, thus bypassing the 2017 legal deadline for full disclosure of all classified materials related to JFK’s assassination.
During Joe Biden’s presidency, more files were gradually unsealed, but several remain classified.
More recently, Trump reversed his 2017 decision with an executive order on Thursday (January 23), directing the director of national intelligence and the attorney general to devise a plan for the release of the final CIA files.
An estimated 3,000 files remain classified, according to Larry J. Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics and author of The Kennedy Half-Century.
There is speculation that the CIA wants to keep these files sealed because they may contain damaging information about their handling of the JFK assassination.
Only time will reveal the truth…