A top Republican senator and House member intend to offer a resolution by the end of the month calling for the full disclosure of U.S. government records related to President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination.
Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Rep. Walter Jones, R-N.C., are working on a congressional resolution to force intelligence agencies, like the CIA, to fully comply with the JFK Records Act of 1992. Under the statute, government agencies are required to fully disclose all records related to the assassination by Oct. 26, 2017.
An aide to Jones confirmed to the Washington Examiner language for the resolution has already been drafted but is unclear when exactly the measure will be officially offered.
Nearly four million pages of records were released in the late 1990s and in the early part of the decade but another 100,000 pages of assassination-related material has yet to be released and is being held by a dozen different government agencies.
The law does permit the CIA, FBI and other government agencies to postpone the release of still-secret JFK records after Oct. 26 but they can only do so with express written permission from the president.
Jones says the American people are owed the full story and it is the government’s obligation to share the truth of Kennedy’s assassination with the American people.
“I want to make sure that the information that is owed the American people is made available,” Jones told AlterNet. “The American people are sick and tired of not being given the truth.”
The CIA hasn’t offered any indication on whether the agency intends to release the documents by the Oct. 26 deadline or if it will seek a postponement.
“CIA continues to engage in the process to determine the appropriate next steps with respect to any previously unreleased CIA information,” CIA spokesperson Nicole de Haay said in a statement Thursday.
Jones is hopeful the agency will not request a postponement, noting that the JFK Records Act was passed unanimously, 435-0 in 1992.
“We’re talking about something that happened 54 years ago,” Jones said. “The first President Bush signed this law and everybody in Congress, Republican, and Democrat, voted for it.”
Jones says he and Grassley intend to enlist the help of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who voted for the law in 1992, along with other colleagues who also voted for the JFK Records Act.
The unreleased records are said to include CIA files on two senior officers involved in assassinations and four burglars tied to the Watergate scandal, along with the top-secret congressional testimony of several witnesses.
For Jones, who was a Sophomore in college at the time of the assassination, Kennedy’s death still continues to resonate.
“I’m from that generation that remembers the tragedy of Dallas very vividly,” Jones said.
The North Carolina congressman says he still maintains an interest in the assassination and the numerous questions that remain largely unanswered over 50 years later, including “did [accused Lee Harvey] Oswald act alone? Did he have accomplices?”
Earlier this summer, the FBI released over 400 previously undisclosed documents related to the CIA and FBI’s investigation of the Kennedy assassination. The July release has caused many experts to raise new questions about the official story.
Jones is optimistic that the records will be released by the Oct. 26 deadline and maintains that 54 years later says the issue is still very important because “if you don’t know history, you have no future.”
