The National Archives posted another 676 records related to President John F. Kennedy’s assassination Friday afternoon, including more than 500 never-before-seen CIA files that contain information about Lee Harvey Oswald and operatives-turned-Watergate burglars James McCord and E. Howard Hunt.
One of the CIA files details Oswald’s visits to the Cuban consulate and Soviet embassy in Mexico City in the weeks before he fatally shot Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963 in Dallas. Oswald himself was shot by nightclub owner Jack Ruby in Dallas police headquarters on live television, fueling decades of conspiracy theories about the assassination.
Other previously secret CIA files reveal the “involuntary” 1970 retirement of McCord and Hunt’s frustration with being consigned to a desk job after covert anti-Castro operations.
The latest document dump was set in motion by the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, which stipulated that the government had to release all remaining assassination records by Oct. 26, 2017. In the days leading up to the deadline, President Trump announced on Twitter that he was allowing “the long blocked and classified JFK FILES to be opened.” But on Oct. 26, Trump bowed to pressure from the CIA, FBI and other agencies by releasing only 2,800 records and withholding 30,000 others. Trump issued a memo saying he would delay making a decision on those files until April 26.
But over the next two days, Trump issued a series of tweets that suggested he wanted to release the remaining documents much sooner. “After strict consultation with General Kelly, the CIA and other Agencies, I will be releasing ALL #JFKFILES other than the names and addresses of any mentioned person who is still living. I am doing this for reasons of full disclosure, transparency and . . . in order to put any and all conspiracy theories to rest.”
