The White House said Thursday that the National Archives will only partially release a final cache of documents related to the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy, as President Trump grants additional time to agencies seeking redactions.
Trump is giving agencies an extra six months to review documents, using his authority to grant a waiver under 1992 legislation that established Thursday as a deadline to release nearly all of the 5 million pages of documents relating to the assassination.
About 1 percent of the collection was withheld in full by a review commission in the 1990s. Another 11 percent was previously released with redactions, according to the archive.
Officials said about 2,800 records will be released Thursday.
Senior administration officials said on a White House background call Thursday evening that Trump granted the waiver in response to concern from agencies about revealing sensitive information, specifically relating to the use of sources and cooperation with other countries.
The officials said Trump will insist that agencies pare down redactions to a bare minimum by the end of the six-month window.
“The vast majority of the requests came from the FBI and the CIA,” one official on the call said.
An official on the call brushed off a question about whether records show the father of Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, was involved in the assassination plot, which the U.S. government blames on a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald. Trump floated the Cruz theory during the 2016 GOP primary.
The official said they would “leave it up to the researchers to make their own determinations.”
The 1992 legislation that requires disclosure passed after the 1991 release of Oliver Stone’s film “JFK,” which revived several conspiracy theories about Kennedy’s assassination.
Trump, who had ultimate censor authority over all but a small subset of records, had expressed enthusiasm as the disclosure neared, tweeting Wednesday, “The long anticipated release of the #JFKFiles will take place tomorrow. So interesting!”
Asked if the president was disappointed in the delay, one official said, “The president wants to ensure there is full transparency here and is expecting that the agencies do a better job at reducing conflicts in the redactions.”
Polling shows that conspiracy theories about Kennedy’s assassination remain widespread.
A FiveThirtyEight-commissioned SurveyMonkey poll conducted last week found just 33 percent of Americans believe only one man was responsible — consistent with the 30 percent found in 2013 by Gallup, which for decades has tracked long-standing doubt. One theory, offered by Trump confidant Roger Stone in a 2013 book argues that Lyndon B. Johnson, who the killing made president, was involved.
Ahead of the documents’ release, experts cautioned that there’s likely nothing that changes the official account of Kennedy’s death, that Oswald acted alone.
One of the 1990s document review board’s members, U.S. District Judge John Tunheim, told the Washington Examiner this week that much of what wasn’t released previously dealt with sources and methods of gathering information, but no deeper secrets about the event.
“Anything that we saw that was information itself about the assassination or about any of the key players such as Lee Harvey Oswald was released, regardless of whether an agency wanted us to protect it or not,” Tunheim said.
