Biden prolongs 58 years of secrecy on JFK files, cites COVID

WASHINGTON — In spring 2018, then-President Donald Trump delayed release of Kennedy assassination files for another 3 1/2 years – files the FBI and CIA had pleaded to keep under wraps.

The new deadline is Tuesday. But historians and conspiracy buffs will have to keep waiting, and some aren’t happy, including Kennedy kin.

Late Friday, the White House issued a memorandum declaring the deadline will not be met because of delays related to COVID-19.

“Unfortunately, the pandemic has had a significant impact” on the National Archives and on assorted agencies and departments seeking to keep archivists from releasing some of their files, the memo reads. “Making these decisions is a matter that requires a professional, scholarly, and orderly process; not decisions or releases made in haste.”

Biden promised an “intensive” review over the next year, with some records released between Dec. 15 and the end of the year, and a “comprehensive release in late 2022.”

In 1992, Congress set a 25-year deadline for releasing remaining documents stemming from John F. Kennedy’s murder in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

All such records “should be eventually disclosed to enable the public to become fully informed about the history surrounding the assassination,” Congress found. “Most of the records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy are almost 30 years old, and only in the rarest cases is there any legitimate need for continued protection of such records.”

“The need to protect records concerning the assassination has only grown weaker with the passage of time,” Congress found – a passage invoked both by Biden and Trump as they delayed release.

Gerald Posner, author of Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK, called it only “the latest excuse” for stalling offered by one of Kennedy’s successors.

Two of the late president’s nephews vented frustration to Politico about the ongoing delays.

“It’s an outrage. It’s an outrage against American democracy. We’re not supposed to have secret governments within the government,” said Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose own father was also assassinated. “How the hell is it 58 years later, and what in the world could justify not releasing these documents?”

His cousin, former Rhode Island congressman Patrick Kennedy, whose father Ted Kennedy served for decades in the Senate, echoed impatience to help the public understand “something that left such a scar in this nation’s soul.”

When the deadline set by Congress in 1992 arrived on Oct. 26, 2017, Trump had been in office for nine months. He gave federal agencies a six-month extension to plead the case for keeping selected records sealed on the basis of national security.

The FBI and CIA in particular had pressed for more time.

From July to December 2017, the archives released 34,813 documents.

Another 18,731 were released on April 26, 2018, when Trump set a new deadline — Oct. 26, 2021 — for the National Archive and agencies to review 15,884 records that had been partially released, some with such heavy redactions as to make them useless to researchers.

He also signaled a willingness to keep some records sealed beyond that date.

Much of the late 2017 dump related to organized crime probes with no apparent link to the JFK investigation.

But there were eye-popping nuggets, such as the secret 1978 testimony from a former CIA station chief in Mexico City who called assassin Lee Harvey Oswald “loony” and most likely a lone wolf.

“The American public doesn’t want to believe that one man could murder Camelot,” the official, David Atlee Phillips, a Fort Worth native, told the House Select Committee on Assassinations, according to files released Dec. 15, 2017. “God knows I would like for it to come out that Fidel Castro was responsible or that the Soviets were responsible.”

“But I know of no evidence to show that the Cubans or the Soviets put him up to it, and I just have to go along on the side that he was a kind of loony fellow who decided to shoot the president, and he did,” he testified.

Historians, assassination buffs and conspiracy theorists have been digging for years through previously secret files.

They’ve been eager for yet more documentation that might affirm or dispel a myriad of theories, or cast valuable light on countless unrelated topics, from the U.S. escalation in Vietnam to assassination plots and meddling with unfriendly regimes in Cuba, Chile and other nations.

Records released under Trump included FBI and CIA reports on Soviet spies, the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and Lee Harvey Oswald’s trip to Mexico City a few weeks before he murdered Kennedy.

For decades, debate has raged not only over whether Oswald acted alone but also whether the FBI and CIA could have stopped him. The voluminous record shows unequivocally that he was in their sights, though none of the records unsealed in 2017 and 2018 fully put to rest conspiracy theories.

For instance, a 1975 CIA memo marked “top secret” shows that Oswald was on a “watch list” of people whose mail would be intercepted from Nov. 9, 1959, to May 3, 1960, and again from Aug. 7, 1961, through May 28, 1962.

*** This article has been archived for your research. The original version from The Dallas Morning News can be found here ***