This means that 97 percent of Kennedy files are now publicly available, White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre said Thursday. She initially spoke of more than 12,000 documents. The National Archives said there were 13,173 documents.
Jean-Pierre said Biden is keeping his promise to “disclose as much as possible all information related to the assassination of President Kennedy” as consistent with national security.
The US National Archives write on their website that most of the approximately five million documents, photos, videos, audio recordings and artifacts related to the murder have been fully accessible since the late 1990s. Since 2017, more than 53,000 partially redacted documents have been published.
According to the US National Archives, more than 3,000 documents remain under lock and key. Part of it will open to the public in six months, Jean-Pierre said. Biden has ordered that all information related to the Kennedy assassination be released as soon as national security allows.
Political scientist Larry Sabato, author of the book “The Kennedy Half-Century”, told CNN that he did not expect any groundbreaking new insights from the published documents. “It won’t change the story,” Sabato said.
The US foreign intelligence agency CIA, which some conspiracy theorists believe was involved in the assassination, told the US media that all information available to the agency directly related to Kennedy’s assassination has already been published.
Kennedy was shot dead on November 22, 1963 in an open car in Dallas, Texas. The Democratic politician was only 46 years old. The commission of inquiry set up by Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, concluded that alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
To this day, the circumstances of Oswald’s assassination and assassination on live television cameras that followed soon after are the source of numerous conspiracy theories.
In 1991, the feature film “JFK – Tatort Dallas” by director Oliver Stone, starring Kevin Costner, caused a sensation. It was based on a book by former New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, who tried to prove in court in the late 1960s that Oswald could not be the only shooter.
Partly because of renewed public interest in the film’s assassination, the United States Congress passed legislation in 1992 mandating the release of all Kennedy files by 2017. For reasons of national security and the corona pandemic, the deadline was pushed back several times.
(SDA)