Additional documents withheld under court seal or for grand jury secrecy, Director of National Intelligence says in statement
The US National Archives released around 80,000 pages of declassified records late Tuesday related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy (JFK) following an executive order by President Donald Trump.
The documents, which have been uploaded to a portal maintained by the National Archives, are part of a long-awaited effort to disclose all government records related to the assassination. Trump's executive order, signed on Jan. 23, directed the full release of the remaining files, calling it a matter of public interest.
“This release consists of approximately 80,000 pages of previously classified records that will be published with no redactions,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in a statement.
However, it added that certain records withheld under court seal or for grand jury secrecy remain classified.
A 1992 law ordered the release of all files pertaining to the killing of JFK by Oct. 26, 2017 but allowed presidents to forestall their public dissemination if they certified that releasing them would have created "an identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations" that outweighed the public interest.
Trump in his first term and then President Joe Biden throughout his time in office consistently postponed their release.
"They've been waiting for that for decades. And I said during the campaign I'd release them, and I'm a man of my word," Trump told reporters Monday.
"You got a lot of reading. I don't believe we're going to redact anything. I said, 'just don't redact. You can't redact,'" he added.
It was not immediately clear which documents, if any, had been previously released in some form or were completely new to the public.
“The collection of records that we reviewed, the vast majority of which were released — some were kept classified in whole or in part — if that's what we're talking about, then there is no smoking gun,” Tom Samulok, the former deputy director of the Assassination Records Review Board, told CNN
Several analysts studying the JFK assassination told US media outlets that the new documents are unlikely to reveal anything groundbreaking.
The FBI recently uncovered 2,400 previously undisclosed records related to the assassination found within 14,000 pages of documents during a review triggered by President Trump's January executive order to release all JFK assassination files. The records, which were not submitted to the JFK Assassination Records Review Board or the National Archives, may contain critical details about the investigation that were kept secret for decades.
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