Larry J., director of the University of Virginia Center for Political Science and author of Kennedy Half Century.
“For a long time, we had a lot of work to do and people just need to accept that,” he said.
Trump told reporters on Monday that there are administrations that will release 80,000 documents, although it is not clear how many of them are already publicly published in millions of pages of records.
“We have a lot of paper,” Trump said during a visit to the John Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington.
Researchers estimate that around 3,000 documents have not been released in whole or in part. The FBI said last month that it had found about 2,400 new records related to assassination. Many people who have studied what the government has released so far say the public should not expect any shocking revelation from the newly released documents, but still have a great interest in the details related to the assassination and the events around it. Trump’s January order directed the National Intelligence Director and Attorney General to develop a plan to release records.
Kennedy visited Dallas on November 22, 1963. As his convoy completed the parade route downtown, shot out from the Texas school book storage building. Police arrested Lee Harvey Oswald, 24, who located himself from the sniper perch on the sixth floor. Two days later, nightclub owner Jack Ruby fatally shot Oswald during a prison transfer.
A year after the assassination, President Lyndon B. Johnson formed the Warren Commission to investigate and concluded that Oswald was acting alone and had no evidence of conspiracy. But this has not calmed down the network of alternative theories for decades.
In the early 1990s, the federal government stipulated that all documents related to assassination were placed in a single collection of the National Archives and Records Administration. The collection must be open in 2017, prohibiting any waivers designated by the President.
Trump, who took office in 2017, had said he would allow all remaining records to be released, but eventually blocked some records due to what he called potential harm to national security. Although the Joe Biden administration president continues to release archives during the presidency, some people are still out of sight.
Sabato said his team has a “long list of sensitive documents” that it is looking for a lot of fixes before.
“They have to have something very, very sensitive to edit paragraphs or pages in a document like this,” he said. “Some of them are about Cuba, some of them are about things that the CIA does or are not related to Lee Harvey Oswald.”
