US releases final trove of secret Kennedy assassination files

by Chris Lefkow

The US National Archives on Tuesday released the final batch of files related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy — a case that still fuels conspiracy theories more than 60 years after his death.

The move follows an executive order issued by President Donald Trump in January directing the unredacted release of the remaining files related to the assassinations of Kennedy, his brother, former attorney general Robert F. Kennedy, and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

"In accordance with President Donald Trump's directive... all records previously withheld for classification that are part of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection are released," the Archives said in a statement on its website Tuesday evening.

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The National Archives has released millions of pages of records over the past decades relating to the assassination of then-president Kennedy in November 1963, but thousands of documents had been held back at the request of the Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation, citing national security concerns.

The Warren Commission that investigated the shooting of the charismatic 46-year-old president determined that it was carried out by a former Marine sharpshooter, Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone.

But that formal conclusion has done little to quell speculation that a more sinister plot was behind Kennedy's murder in Dallas, Texas, and the slow release of the government files has added fuel to various conspiracy theories.

Kennedy scholars have said the documents that were still held by the archives were unlikely to contain any bombshell revelations or put to rest the rampant conspiracy theories about the assassination of the 35th US president.

Oswald was shot by a strip club owner, Jack Ruby, on November 24, 1963 -- two days after the Kennedy assassination -- while being moved to a county jail.

Many of the records already released were raw intelligence, including scores of reports from FBI agents following up leads that led nowhere.

Much of what they contain was also previously known, such as that the communist-obsessed CIA cooked up several outlandish plots to murder Cuba's Fidel Castro.

Oswald defected to the Soviet Union in 1959 but returned to the United States in 1962.

Hundreds of books and movies such as the 1991 Oliver Stone film "JFK" have fueled the conspiracy industry, pointing the finger at Cold War rivals the Soviet Union or Cuba, the Mafia and even Kennedy's vice president, Lyndon Johnson.

The release of the documents follows an October 26, 1992 act of Congress which required that the unredacted assassination records held in the National Archives be released in full 25 years later.