Biden ordered the release of the JFK assassination file, no blockbuster is expected | US News

The release of thousands of documents related to the assassination of John F Kennedy is unlikely to shed any significant light on the 1963 shooting of the US president.

The National Archives released 13,173 documents related to the murder while keeping hundreds of other sensitive records secret for up to a year after President Joe Biden issued an executive order authorizing it.

The documents are not expected to contain any new bombshells or change the conclusions of the Warren Commission, led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, that the killer Lee Harvey Oswald, a former Soviet Union Former Marine and communist activist, goes it alone.

On November 22, 46-year-old Kennedy was shot and killed while riding in a motorcade through Dallas.

Thousands of books, articles, TV shows, and movies have explored how the president’s assassination was the result of an elaborate conspiracy involving agencies such as the CIA, the Mafia, the Russians, and even his vice president, Lyndon B. Johnson .

No one has offered conclusive evidence that Oswald — who was shot dead by nightclub owner Jack Ruby two days after killing JFK — worked with anyone else, although in the 59 years since the assassination, As a conspiracy theory, it has quite a long afterlife.

Many of the documents released Thursday belonged to the CIA, and several focused on Oswald’s operations and contacts.

The U.S. government opened a file on Oswald in December 1960, nearly three years before Kennedy was killed and after his failed defection to the Soviet Union in 1959.

Copies of Lee Harvey Oswald's letters to Soviet leaders seeking political asylum previously released by the National Archives
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Copies of Lee Harvey Oswald’s letters to Soviet leaders seeking political asylum previously released by the National Archives

A December 1963 document describes how CIA officers in Mexico City “intercepted” an October call from Oswald to the Soviet ambassador there “using his own name” and “in broken Russian” from the city Hall phone.

The documents show that Oswald wanted to pass through Cuba en route to Russia and was applying for a visa.

There were initial concerns that Oswald’s killer, Ruby, might have some connection to Oswald.

But a newly released September 1964 memo to the Presidential Commission investigating the assassination stated that “the CIA has no indication that Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald knew each other, were related to each other, or could have been in any way way is related”.

It took many years for these documents to emerge. Congress ordered in 1992 that all remaining sealed documents related to the investigation into JFK’s death should be fully accessible to the public by 2017, except for documents the president authorized to withhold further.

In 2017, Donald Trump released a batch of records but decided to release the rest on a rolling basis. The remaining JFK documents were originally scheduled for release in October 2021.

Biden delayed the planned release, citing delays caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, and announced it would be revealed in two tranches: one in December 2021 and another in 2022 after a year of intensive scrutiny. Disclosed on December 15.

With Thursday’s release, 95 percent of the CIA’s record on JFK’s assassination will be made public.

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