Is President Biden 'Washing His Hands' of JFK Assassination Records?

Last December, President Joe Biden’s administration released more than 13,000 documents related to the November 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. However, some 3% of the JFK documents were still redacted or withheld from release. In a memo on Friday, the Biden Administration said it was choosing to continue to withhold some of those documents. Others will be released. To date, about 99% of the documents have been released.

“This action reflects [President Biden’s] instruction that all information related to President Kennedy’s assassination should be released except when the strongest possible reasons counsel otherwise,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Friday, according to CNN.

The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 set a 2017 deadline for the release of all related documents, but the release has been delayed time and again. The 2017 deadline was waived by former President Donald Trump, and the Biden Administration has continued to withhold some of the documents “to protect against an identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or the conduct of foreign relations that is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure.”

On May 1, the acting archivist of the United States recommended that the release of certain redacted documents be temporarily postponed. Some documents that were previously withheld, however, were scheduled for release by Friday. Between April and June, the National Archives and Records Administration put out 2,672 documents with new information regarding the JFK assassination, according to the archive’s website. There’s no information on when the rest of the documents will be released.

The National Archives and Records Administration did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

In an emailed statement, Nicola Longford, an executive director for Dallas' Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, a JFK assassination museum housed in the building from which alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald shot, said: "These much-anticipated releases may provide additional insights to researchers and historians, helping to advance the museum’s mission helping to place into context the assassination of President Kennedy. We anticipate that the availability of previously withheld records could lead to a broader understanding of the assassination and the time period."

One person who took issue with the delayed release was Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “It’s not about conspiracy – it is about transparency,” JFK’s nephew said in a post on Twitter.

He called the White House’s announcement unlawful. “In 1992 the JFK Records Act was passed unanimously by Congress with the promise that all assassination related records would be released no later than October 2017,” Kennedy wrote. He said this promise has been broken by Biden’s recent announcement.

Kennedy said that trust in government is at an all-time low and that releasing the rest of the documents could be a small step toward restoring that trust. Of course, this is the same Kennedy who doubts the effectiveness of vaccines and, according to Rolling Stone, says that “vaccine research has actually created some of the worst plagues in our history.”

“The president is out of the picture." – Jefferson Morley, Mary Ferrell Foundation

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Some more serious voices on the JFK assassination documents can be found at the Mary Ferrell Foundation, which maintains the largest online archive of JFK assassination documents. It was named after a legal secretary who was working in downtown Dallas on the day of the assassination. Ferrell and her sons compiled records on the assassination until she died at the age of 81 in 2004. The foundation’s work, however, continues.

It sued the Biden Administration in October in an attempt to get the remaining JFK documents released. The suit claims that JFK assassination documents have been unlawfully redacted and withheld from public disclosure.

The last time records were released, back in December, a memo from the president set a June 30 deadline for the release of the remaining documents. However, this time around there’s no such deadline.

Biden said in his memo that this was the last certification he would be doing on the JFK assassination records. Instead of having the president authorize the release of records, intelligence agencies like the CIA submitted what Biden called transparency plans to the National Archives that will help determine the release of records going forward.

Journalist Jefferson Morley, vice president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation and editor of jfkfacts.org and its Substack newsletter, told the Observer, “The president is out of the picture,” when it comes to the remaining documents. “So, he’s washing his hands of JFK records,” Morley said. “That’s not a service to history, and it’s not consistent with the law. The JFK records act says the president has certain nondelegable duties and he has delegated his duties.”

The Mary Ferrell Foundation will be in court on July 13 in San Francisco, where it will argue for an injunction to stop the implementation of the transparency plans because it’s a violation of the law, he said.

People might say that there’s nothing new in the recently released records or the ones that haven’t been released yet, Morley said. “That is simply false,” he said. “We’ve had a bunch of really interesting releases in the past six months.”

For example, a memo released in December said a CIA station in Miami conducted its own JFK assassination investigation, Morley said. The memo, which detailed the investigation, was written by an undercover CIA officer named Donald Heath. This investigation was taking place at a time when many said that Oswald had acted alone, and there was nothing else to it, Morley said. The results of this CIA Miami investigation have never been made public.

“So, the Heath memo is a very significant document because it shows that the official story was doubted from day one, not by conspiracy theorists but by the CIA itself,” Morley said.

Another example is a memo written by historian Arthur Schlesinger, who was a special assistant and court historian to President Kennedy. He wrote a memo to the president in 1961 after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. According to Morley, Kennedy was thinking of reorganizing the CIA after the failure of the invasion, and he asked Schlesinger how to do it. Schlesinger wrote a five-page memo talking about problems that the CIA causes for U.S. foreign policy. One and a half pages of this memo were redacted by the CIA. “It’s outrageous,” Morley said.

In December, the memo was released again, with just one more sentence unredacted. This is one of the documents at issue in the Mary Ferrell Foundation lawsuit.

The lawsuit asks for the release of several other specific sets of documents. These include files on three CIA officers tied to Oswald and a 1962 Defense Department false flag plan called Operation Northwoods, which called for a staged violent incident in the U.S. to be blamed on Cuba.

The suit claims records regarding plots to assassinate Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, a JFK-related document from Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt’s security file and 44 other documents related to a CIA agent named George Joannides have been unlawfully redacted as well. Joannides operated a covert Cuba-related program that allegedly came into contact with Oswald months before the assassination of JFK.

“They’re acting like they have something to hide,” Morley said. “So, the most reasonable conclusion is they have something to hide. That’s what they’re telling us. That’s what they’re acting like. So, that’s where we’re at.”

Now, Morley said, the fight for the documents will mostly take place in court. “What Biden did was he kind of slammed the door on working through the process as it has existed,” Morley said. “So, now the struggle really does move to court. We can’t work within the system anymore.”