The Biden administration released a series of previously classified documents that they hope will shed light on the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Experts say nothing in the release shows a 'smoking gun' that proves any conspiracy theory, however a couple of tidbits are raising eyebrows. Lee Harvey Oswald met with a KGB agent just two months before the Kennedy's assassination and an anonymous tipster claimed there was a $100,000 bounty on the popular president -- but the information was never passed onto the CIA.
Those revelations were almost 1,500 documents released on Wednesday, still leaving more than 10,000 either partially redacted or withheld entirely. The longtime debate between government and JFK researchers will continue to go on, as some have argued that the CIA, the FBI and other national security agencies have continually stonewalled a congressionally mandated release of the documents.
Longtime JFK researchers say that the documents released likely do not include information that would change the public's perception surrounding Kennedy's death.
Releasing all of the remaining documents was mandated by Congress in 1992, and lawmakers believe it would restore faith in the functioning of government.
"Because it has taken [the government] so long to get these records out, no matter what comes out, no one is going to believe that that's it," a official familiar with the classification concerns related to the documents said.
Biden delayed a scheduled release in October to "protect against identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or the conduct of foreign relations that is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in the immediate disclosure."
Instead, he set two deadlines for the release of documents. The first on Wednesday, for any documents that national security agencies have not proposed be withheld. The other on Dec. 15, 2022, to allow for the remaining documents to undergo a rigorous security review and then be released.
Some transparency advocates say another filing that the government is expected to make on Wednesday will be more significant than the documents. While agencies that plan to continue to withhold particular documents past December 2022 are scheduled to provide to the White House "an unclassified index identifying for each such record the reasons for which the agency is proposing continued postponement of information in such record," according to Biden's October order.
Larry Schnapf, a lawyer and assassination researcher, said on Tuesday that he plans to sue Biden for failing to release the records in full. He has previously sued for internal government communications underpinning the decision behind successive postponements by both former President Donald Trump and Biden.
"We will be seeking a court order instructing the President to release the remaining records or to disclose the specific identifiable harm posed by each document sought to be postponed and how such alleged harm outweighs the strong public interest in the release of these records -- which were supposed to have been released by October 26, 2017," Schnapf wrote in an email to reporters on Tuesday.
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