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Topics: Crime, Donald Trump, History, Politics, US News
The Trump administration has released a trove of documents on the assassination of former US President John F. Kennedy, painting an eerie picture of the tragic 1963 event.
JFK, former 35th President of the United States, was shot to death on November 22, 1963, during a visit to Dallas, Texas - two years and ten months after assuming office.
The Massachusetts-born politician’s assassination has sparked six decades worth of conspiracy theories, with some adamant that gunman Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone, despite FBI declarations.
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In an attempt to put long unanswered questions to bed on Tuesday (March 18) President Donald Trump’s administration announced that all of the government’s classified files had been released.
For the first time, thousands of pages of records are available for public perusal for the first time, as per USA Today.
Historians have claimed they would ‘need time’ to comb through the undereducated files to understand their significance and if they are much different from previous releases.
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"You got a lot of reading," Trump, 78, told reporters on Monday (March 17) during a visit to the John F. Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts. "I don't believe we're going to redact anything.”
However, the BBC states that some of the unsealed files did appear to have passages blacked out, while other pages were illegible due to fading and poor scanning.
While experts continue to decipher the material, some bombshell details have already emerged, offering insight into the fourth assassination of a US President in history.
According to the National Archives and Records Administration, most of the records related to JFK’s assassination have already been released.
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However, various pages were held back due to being believed to ‘harm national security’.
Trump signed an executive order to release the remaining classified files on JFK’s assassination earlier this year, honoring his campaign pledge to provide more transparency about the fatal Texas event, as per Reuters.
Around 2,200 new documents are now in the public domain, with Jefferson Morley, vice president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, calling the release an ‘encouraging start’.
Previously, Trump stated that around 80,000 pages would be made public.
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Lee Harvey Oswald, who was camped out in a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository, was 24 when he shot and killed JFK.
After killing the Democrat, the veteran drove through Dealey Plaza in Dallas, he murdered police officer J. D. Tippit before being arrested in a local movie theatre.
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The Express reports that Oswald was allegedly being monitored by the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (KGB) and that he had a ‘stormy relationship’ with his wife, Marina Nikolayevna Prusakova.
“Oswald had a stormy relationship with his Soviet wife, who rode him incessantly,” the document reads.
In another, Oswald was described as having a ‘poor shot’ while being observed on a USSR firing range.
The declassified JFK filings include a letter sent to the British Embassy by a man named Sergyj Czornonoh.
The note claimed that he told officials in London, who detained him in July 1963, about Oswald and how he planned to kill the president.
It is also claimed American Vice Consul Tom Blackshear was informed of Oswald’s plans and that he'd defected to Russia, known then as the Soviet Union.
Despite these warnings, the CIA failed to reprimand Oswald, nor did they closely monitor him upon his return to the US.
Jack Ruby, an American nightclub owner, shot and mortally wounded Oswald on live TV two days after the murder of JFK.
The Chicago native later had his conviction and death sentence overturned and was granted a new trial, but died of a pulmonary embolism on January 3, 1967, following his cancer diagnosis.
The documents claim Ruby - born Jacob Leon Rubenstein - had a history of involvement with racketeering and illegal gambling, suggesting he may have been motivated to complete Oswald’s silencing by others.
“For some, he’s the Rosetta Stone of the JFK conspiracy,” said Stephen Fagin, curator at the Sixth Floor Museum. “For others, he’s just a man who acted on impulse to avenge Kennedy.”
Addressed in the documents is the long-standing rumor that Oswald and the KGB were in cahoots.
One of the files explains how E.B. Smith, an American professor, befriended a CIA agent who was working in the St Petersburg station in the months leading up to JFK’s assassination.
It’s understood Smith told the agent about a KGB official known as ‘Slava’ Nikonov, with the document stating: “Nikonov is now confident that Oswald was at no time an agent controlled by the KGB.”
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One of the biggest bombshells to come from the filings is that most of the information released at the Trump administration's directive - designed to 'reveal the truth' of the event - is not new.
In 2023, former US President Joe Biden released 17,000 documents into the public domain.
Many critics and conspiracy theorists who were hoping to learn more from the documents have taken to social media to have their say, with one writing: “The JFK Files contain REDACTED versions of files that have already been released un-redacted.
“Just like with the Epstein Files. We’ve been played.”
Someone else commented: “WOW! Did Trump really just release all of the same JFK files that Biden released in 2023?”
Journalist Ed Krassenstein added: “The only difference? The top of Biden’s says '2023 Release', and Trump's says '2025 release' and the word 'secret' is crossed out in Trump's release.”