Inside the 24-Hour Scramble Among Top National Security Officials Over the J.F.K. Documents
President Trump’s national security team was amazed and forced to stampede after he announced on Monday that it would issue 80,000 pages of documents related to the assassination of President John Kennedy with only 24 hours notification.
Administration officials have been working on issuing records since January, when Mr. Trump signed an executive order imposed on him. But this process was still ongoing on Monday afternoon when Mr. Trump said, during a visit to the John Kennedy Center for Dramatic Arts, that the files will be provided the next day.
by the time The files have been announced On Tuesday evening, some of the country’s senior national security officials spent hours in an attempt to assess any potential security risks under the pressure of the extreme deadline.
John Ratcliffe, director of the CIA, asserted the senior administration officials that some documents have nothing to do with Mr. Kennedy and were developed after decades of assassination, according to four people with knowledge of discussions. He wanted to make sure that other officials were fully aware of what the files appeared and would not be neglected, but it was clear that he would not seek to hinder any files from their launch, speaking on the condition that his identity was not disclosed to discuss sensitive internal deliberations.
Soon after Mr. Trump spoke on Monday afternoon, National Security Council officials soon conducted an invitation to draw a plan to evaluate the documents that are still necessary. It was necessary to coordinate with the architectural management and national records. People said that some officials raised concerns about unintended consequences of rushing to issue files, including detection of sensitive personal information such as social security numbers for people who were still alive.
The officials involved in the bodies process said that the number of files has expanded significantly over many decades because, with every investigation into the material related to Kennedy, the information that had nothing to do with the president who was assassinated under that umbrella was not. In some cases, this includes documents created after decades of his death, according to one person on the knowledge of this process.
“President Trump promised to issue all JFK files – he fulfills this promise,” Caroline Levitte, a White House press secretary, said in a statement. “Anyone who was surprised by this did not notice or was intentionally ignorant.”
When asked on Monday if he knew what was in the files, Mr. Trump said he had “heard about them” but he did not receive an executive summary.
He said, “I do not do summaries.”
Speakers of NSC and CIA refused to comment. A spokesman for the national archives did not respond to the request for comment.
For decades, historians and conspiracy theorists alike provided more information about Kennedy’s death. The 1992 law requested that the government release death documents within 25 years, with the exception of documents that may harm national security.
In 2017, Mr. Trump issued some additional documents, but he also gave intelligence agencies more time to evaluate files and include updates. Taker Carlson, the former Fox News and his partner, told Mr. Trump that the president came to regret this decision, and Mr. Trump made his efforts to issue documents as a long promise to the American people.
Just a few years ago, Mr. Trump said he had no great interest in the files, which historians and many of his partners wanted to see for decades. In an interview with a correspondent in the New York Times in September 2021, Mr. Trump said he was “not curious” about the papers.
He said: “The reason I did this was that I thought it was appropriate,” explaining why he sought to raise the level of files during his first term. “When you have something very secret, it makes it look very bad. I think they may have got it properly, and you may have got it properly. Let people examine it.”
But many people in the orbit of Mr. Trump, including Mr. Carlson and the longest political advisor to Mr. Trump, Roger J. Stone Junior, pressed the president for years to request the release of all files.
“The man who sat on his office was killed, and every subsequent president has hidden why and who is.” “How can you live like this?”
Kennedy’s assassination The conspiracy theories have always been fedIncluding some that Mr. Trump himself has been indulged. He also used attention to the assassination when it was politically appropriate.
When Robert F. supported. Kennedy Junior, who was assassinated by his father, Mr. Trump in August, renewed Mr. Trump’s promise to release all documents related to the killing of both Kennedy and the establishment of an independent committee to study assassination attempts, including documents on Mr. Trump in Bater, Pennsylvania, last year.
Mr. Trump said: “This is a honor in honor of Bobby.”
He added: “I didn’t have more people asking me,” Please, sir.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Mr. Trump At a point of claim Senator Ted Cruz’s father of Texas was with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before President Kennedy was killed.
“You know, his father was with Lee Harvey Oswald before Oswald – as you know, shot Mr. Trump Fox News said In an interview in May 2016, where he was running against Mr. Cruz for Republican Nomination. “I mean, everything is ridiculous. What is this, is it not?
On Monday, Mr. Trump attended the meeting of the Board of Directors at the Kennedy Center, a institution that he reformed by making himself president and fixing the loyalists, Including Richard Greenil, who briefly served as a public prosecutor for national intelligence in the last year of Mr. Trump’s first state. While he was leaving, Mr. Trump said he had a “big advertisement to be issued.”
“While we are here, I thought it would be appropriate,” he said. “We announce tomorrow and give all Kennedy files. So – people were waiting for decades.”
