Trump administration releases last batch of JFK assassination files

A new tranche of files related to the 1963 assassination of US President John F. Kennedy has been released on the orders of the Trump administration.

Around 2,200 files — consisting of more than 63,000 pages — were posted on the website of the US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) on Tuesday.

The vast majority of the archives' 6 million pages of records, photographs, motion pictures, sound recordings and artefacts related to the assassination had already been available to the public.

President Donald Trump told reporters on Monday that the release was coming, though he estimated it at about 80,000 pages.

"We have a tremendous amount of paper. You've got a lot of reading," Trump said while visiting the John F. Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts in Washington, which he has recently brought under his personal control.

Trump's order

Trump ordered the release of the remaining classified files related to the assassination shortly after he was sworn into office.

He directed the national intelligence director and attorney general to develop a plan to release the records. The order also aimed to declassify the remaining federal records on the 1968 assassinations of the politician Robert F. Kennedy and the activist Martin Luther King Jr.

After signing the order, Trump handed the pen to an aide and directed that it be given to Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the US government's top health official.

Kennedy Jr is the nephew of John F. Kennedy and the son of Robert F. Kennedy.

The US health secretary, whose anti-vaccine activism has alienated him from much of his family, has said he is not convinced that a lone gunman was solely responsible for his uncle's assassination.

The fateful day

When the 35th US president and his wife Jacqueline Kennedy touched down in Dallas on 22 November 1963, they were greeted by a clear sky and enthusiastic crowds lining the streets. With a re-election campaign on the horizon, they had gone to Texas to mend political fences.

But as the motorcade was finishing its parade route downtown, shots rang out from the nearby Texas School Book Depository, and the president sustained catastrophic head injuries.

The incident was infamously captured on film in graphic footage that has been pored over by experts and conspiracy theorists ever since.

Police soon arrested the shooter, 24-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald, who had positioned himself at a window on the depository's sixth floor.

Two days later, nightclub owner Jack Ruby fatally shot Oswald in public during a jail transfer.

In 1964, the Warren Commission, which President Lyndon B. Johnson established to investigate the killing, concluded that Oswald had acted alone and that there was no evidence of a conspiracy — setting the stage for decades of conjecture and suspicion about what really happened, and in particular whether the CIA was somehow involved.

In the early 1990s, the federal government mandated that all assassination-related documents be housed in a single collection in the NARA. The collection was originally required to be opened by 2017, barring any exemptions designated by the president.

During his first term in 2017, Trump said that he would allow the release of all of the remaining records. However, like other presidents before him, he ended up holding some back on national security grounds.

Files continued to be released during President Joe Biden's administration.

Researchers have estimated that around 3,000 have yet to be released either in whole or in part. Last month, the FBI said that it had discovered about 2,400 new records related to the assassination.

The agency said it was working to transfer the records to the archives, so that they can be included in the declassification process.

What's been learned

Some of the documents from previous releases have offered details on the way intelligence services operated at the time. They include CIA cables and memos discussing visits by Oswald to the Soviet and Cuban embassies during a trip to Mexico City shortly before the assassination.

One CIA memo describes how Oswald phoned the Soviet embassy while in Mexico City to ask for a visa to visit the USSR.

He also visited the Cuban embassy, apparently interested in a visa that would permit him to travel to Cuba and await his Soviet visa there.

The former marine had previously defected to the USSR before returning home. On 3 Oct 1963, he drove back into the US through a crossing point at the Texas border.