By Robert Reynolds
The JFK Assassination Records Collection (ARC) returned to the news in 2024, with then presidential-candidate Donald Trump claiming credit for releasing stacks of withheld records during his first term, and vowing to release what remained during a second term.
Trump did indeed open many records from the collection in 2017-2018. But his administration left thousands of records redacted as well, and the release process itself was less than transparent, with press speculation and anonymous second- or third-hand sourcing taking the place of documentation and comprehension.
Following Trump 1.0, the Biden administration also had a crack at the records, restoring much text that had been redacted from documents, but still leaving blanks in as many as 3,000 records. That gave Trump 2.0 one more chance to tantalize the public with the prospect of new revelations.
What are the prospects for more releases? In the past, the dearth of information on the Trump 1.0 releases made it hard to prognosticate how release of the small remaining set of redacted records might play out. Fortunately, a Freedom of Information request to the National Archives has made new documentation available on the 2017-2018 release process, shedding useful light on future releases.[1]
More releases will certainly come, but what about prospects for revelations? There has been more than enough time to sift through and weigh the meaning of the increasingly elusive redactions in the collection, and as the fortune-telling 8 ball says, “Outlook not so good.”
Releasing JFK Records: A Look Back
The JFK Assassination Records Collection (ARC) is the US government’s primary collection of records on the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, subsequent investigations of Kennedy’s death, and the cold war background of the assassination.
The collection was established by the 1992 JFK Act, which gave final custody of the records to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). The act also created a limited-term federal board, the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), to secure, review, and oversee the release of the records. By the time the Board closed its doors in 1998, it had placed more than 300,000 records in the collection, about 88 percent of which were released in full.
Why were 12 percent of ARC records not released in full, or in federal governmentese, portions of these documents were “redacted”? The JFK Act allowed for postponing sensitive government and personal information in the records, up until a final release date of 26 October 2017. Departments, bureaus, and agencies were permitted to request redactions, subject to case-by-case review by the ARRB. Even though the ARRB established strict guidelines, 12 percent of the records met the board's criteria for postponements of one kind or another, for periods of time ranging from a few years up until October 2017.
What has to be remembered though is that the ARRB was determined to release, before going out of business, any and all records judged central to the assassination story, and it succeeded in this task. Board members and staffers have always, and vigorously, defended the Board’s record in this regard. As ARRB chairman John Tunheim told author Vincent Bugliosi, “The Board protected [postponed] nothing, not one document or page, that was centrally related [emphasis added] to the facts of the assassination itself.”
This key point cannot be stressed enough in any discussion of the ARC, although it is often ignored. The lengthy reviews and releases undertaken in 2017-2018 and afterward are important for completing the task set out in the JFK Act. But the key records, documents, artifacts that together constitute the basic facts have been accessible to the public since 1998, if not long before. Post-1998 releases have added interesting details here and there, but they have not changed our basic understanding of central facts. Nor will they ever do so in the future.
After the ARRB
The JFK Act stipulated 26 October 2017 as the “final” release date, 25 years after the legislation went into effect. But few things are absolute in the federal government, and the ARC was no exception. From the outset this deadline was not rigid. Congress exempted certain records from release entirely, including tax returns and court-sealed documents. Even the releasable records in the collection, also known as “section five records,” were the subject of a general exemption, spelled out in section 5(g)(2)(D).
This section allowed a department or agency (D/A) to request permission to hold back information in records it originated beyond 26 October 2017 if it was “made necessary by an identifiable harm to the military, defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations,” and if “the identifiable harm is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure.” The D/A request had to be submitted to the president, who in turn, had to certify that the information held back met the Act’s criteria.
In this manner, information could be “postponed” in two ways: 1) a whole record could withheld, such as a tax return or court-sealed documents; 2) a record could be “released in part.” That meant some part of the record was removed from the version released to the public. Nowadays NARA inserts blank boxes in documents to mark where information has been removed. The act of editing the record is called “redacting," and each bit of information removed is a “redaction.” When redacted information is finally restored (usually in a new pdf at NARA’s website), it is said to be “released.” The end state of a record is “released in full,” when all the information in it is publicly available.
Readers should note, however, that when NARA states that “x records were released on this date,” this does not necessarily mean the records were previously unavailable, nor does it always mean that the records are now available in full to the public. Instead, it often (and only) means that a new version of the record is available, one that restores at least one previous redaction. In many cases, NARA has published as many as five or six releases of a single record (on different dates), and each release restored different redactions. This technical use of the word “release” has caused enormous confusion in media reporting on the ARC.
As of January 2025, how many documents in the ARC are completely withheld? According to NARA, there are 515 such records, almost all of these tax returns from people such as Lee Oswald and his relatives, or Jack Ruby and his relatives. Withholding of these tax returns is mandated by the JFK Act and the US tax code and they will never see the light of day unless there is new legislation.
What is the total count of documents in the ARC that still have redactions? NARA does not have an official count, but documentation and actual releases make it clear that there are now fewer than 3,000 records with some portions still withheld from the public. In other words, more than 99 percent of the ARC records are open in full. This is a second key point that cannot be ignored in any discussion of the ARC.
And how did we get from twelve percent redacted in 1998 to less than one percent? Much of that process story is told in a recent Freedom of Information Act release from NARA.
Trump and the JFK records, 2017-2018
During the 2016 presidential election campaign, candidate Trump showed a notable interest in the JFK assassination. His political consultants included people like Roger Stone, author of a book that claimed Kennedy’s assassination was engineered by Vice President Lyndon Johnson. He also alleged that the father of one of his opponents for the GOP nomination, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, was involved with Lee Harvey Oswald in handing out pro-Castro leaflets in New Orleans, and insinuated that Cruz’s father was possibly implicated in the assassination itself. In contrast, Trump had little to say after he assumed office, and when NARA posted the first record releases from the ARC in July 2017.
As the 26 October 2017 deadline approached, however, Trump, sent a series of tweets announcing the forthcoming release of JFK records and proclaimed that his intention was to release as much as possible under the JFK Act. Many in the JFK “research community,” which is dominated by conspiracy theorists, created the false expectation that “key” evidence remained in records not yet released in full, despite the ARRB’s earlier insistence that it had ensured the release of all information central to the facts of the assassination.
On October 26, Trump issued a memo “ordering that the veil finally be lifted” on the records, and over 2,800 JFK records were “released” on NARA’s ARC webpage. Added to the approximately 3,800 records published in July, this meant a total of more than 6,600 previously-redacted records were now available in full to the public. In something of a surprise twist, however, Trump also wrote, in the same memo, that he was certifying a blanket postponement of all other redacted JFK records for six months, in order to re-review the information that departments and agencies had asked him to postpone past October 2017.
This memo did not stop document releases. NARA released four more tranches of documents in November-December 2017, and at the end of the six month re-review, posted another large set of records on 26 April 2018. Most of these records had already appeared in the 2017 releases; their second appearance represented the release of more redacted information from the same records, representing the fruits from the six month re-review.
Following this final release of 2017-2018, Trump issued a second memo, postponing release of all remaining redactions until 26 October 2021, when yet another review was to take place. At this point, NARA estimated that 15,834 records still had redactions.
The 2017-2018 release process and Trump’s tweets, memos, and decisions all fueled an enormous amount of speculation, with not much to back it up. Frustrated by the lack of information on the postponement process, JFK conspiracy buff Lawrence Schnapf filed an FOIA request to NARA in 2021, seeking “correspondence, email, communications, memoranda, or other writings from agencies to the Archivist requesting or proposing postponement of assassination records during 2017 and 2018.” After a delay in processing his request, Schnapf (an attorney) filed suit against NARA and eventually received about 6,000 pages of documents.
Most of this material is redundant, i.e. lists of records, triple their normal length because of formatting problems. But there are also emails from participants in the release process, with important memos and letters sent as attachments. Ironically, despite repeated requests from Washington Decoded, Schnapf did not share most of the FOIA records he received (he recently posted his own analysis of the records here). Washington Decoded finally filed its own FOIA request asking for the same records Schnapf received. This article is based on those documents, which are available on my website here.
Round One: The 2017 Releases
Even without the FOIA docs, the JFK Act itself makes clear NARA is responsible for overseeing document releases mandated by the Act. This was a natural choice. NARA houses the National Declassification Center (NDC) and other important declassification offices, as well as its own Special Access and FOIA Staff, giving NARA extensive authority and experience on declassification matters.
The main authority on national security classification is, of course, the National Security Council (NSC). Operating out of the Executive Office of the President, it houses a labyrinth of classifying and declassifying offices and officers. NSC was naturally integral to carrying out presidential decisions regarding declassification of the JFK records.
The FOIA docs tell us the NARA and NSC officers involved in the 2017-2018 release process. The main correspondents were William (“Jay”) Bosanko, Chief Executive Officer of NARA at that time, and John Fitzpatrick, then Senior Director of Records Access and Information Security (RAIS) at the NSC. In addition to Bosanko and Fitzpatrick, at least two dozen other NARA and NSC names appear in the emails.
The ultimate releasing authority for the JFK records was the president, of course, as is clearly stated in the JFK Act. The NARA FOIA docs give us a clear overview of the release process and the interactions between the departments and agencies, NARA, NSC, and Trump.
The FOIA emails show that NARA provided detailed guidelines on steps needed to request “postponements.” Departments and agencies not requesting postponements were to provide a list of their redacted records and a statement that they didn’t need further protection. Departments and agencies which were requesting postponements had to review all redactions in their records, provide a list of which redactions they wished to continue past October 26, and indicate which JFK Act postponement criteria they had applied.
D/A reviews and requests were then checked by NARA in a second review, to make sure that each D/A had accounted for all its redacted records and applied the JFK Act postponement criteria correctly. And by the end of August 2017, NARA had completed its analysis of FBI, CIA, and DOD record reviews and postponement requests. NARA’s analysis of the FBI review hit some positive notes, writing that “our analysis found no problems in the quality of the FBI's review.” In the end, however, NARA’s analyst concluded that “NARA is concerned that the FBI did not apply the standards of review necessary under the JFK Act.” This was bad news for the FBI, amounting to a demand for a redo of their requests.
NARA’s analysis of the CIA review was almost wholly critical: “[W]e are concerned that a significant volume of the CIA's proposed withholdings are [sic] not consistent with the JFK Act and the prior determinations that the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) made with respect to CIA records and CIA information between 1993 and 1998.” The CIA review received a grade of F, and the analyst ended with a stern recommendation: “Given the large volume of records recommended for postponement, the inconsistencies identified to date, and the limited time available for further review, NARA recommends that the president authorize a temporary postponement of one year for the CIA's proposed postponements.”
Even more sternly, the analyst wrote that “We also recommend that the president establish an interagency working group to review, during the temporary postponement, all of the records proposed for postponement by CIA and the other departments and agencies to ensure that only information that meets the strict standards of the JFK Act are considered for further postponement beyond 25 years.”
The third major review, covering Department of Defense (DOD) documents, was particularly complex. DOD records in the ARC come from many components, including the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Army, Navy, and Air Force intelligence and National Security Agency (NSA). Component postponement reviews and requests were coordinated through the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence (OUSD).
NARA’s analysis of the DOD requests was also tough: “We have concerns with the submissions for AFOSI, DIA, Army INSCOM, and NSA . . . . While we lack the benefit of the supporting justification required under the Act, I think you will see that our concerns nonetheless indicate a need for some additional review and consideration by DOD.”
Given NARA’s strong criticisms of D/A reviews and requests, something clearly had to be done. The recommendation of a year-long redo was rejected, but an interagency working group was implemented in the NSC, which established a “JFK Act Small Group” under the RAIS Policy Coordinating Committee, chaired by RAIS Senior Director, John Fitzpatrick.
Emails mention Small Group meetings on September 7 and 14, and October 13. At the large October meeting, participants included Senior Agency Officers (classification decision makers under Executive Order 13526), “agency representatives” who had previously participated in record reviews, NARA personnel working on the JFK 2017 Project, and several NSC officers, including legal counsels.
One proposal that came up in the Small Group was the creation of a “short list” of records which NARA was willing to certify met JFK Act criteria for postponement. The Small Group apparently anticipated that other records might have to undergo further review or even be released directly by President Trump.
In addition to the Small Group meetings, RAIS Director Fitzpatrick was involved in many aspects of the release process, particularly with the review of DOD records, which generated numerous emails. NARA also kept Fitzpatrick up to date with the progress of DOS, CIA, and FBI reviews, drafts of the recommendations it sent to President Trump, and NARA’s own request to postpone some releases while it reviewed several hundred records of “uncertain status.”
The Archivist Proposes, Trump Disposes
As head of NARA and the archivist of the United States, David Ferriero played a dual role in the ARC releases. On one hand, NARA was itself a D/A and subject to the JFK Act. In this capacity Ferriero wrote to President Trump on 9/26 to recommend that social security numbers of living people in the collection should be held back until after their deaths.
Ferriero was also responsible for implementing the mandate of the JFK Act, and the issues raised in NARA’s analysis of D/A reviews eventually led Ferriero to write President Trump on October 12. Drafts of this letter in the emails were withheld under the FOIA exemption for materials “of a deliberative nature,” but excerpts of the letter are available in other documents.
According to these excerpts, Ferriero expressed “significant concerns” about the standards used in some D/A requests for continued postponements of redactions. While acknowledging that some information “could warrant continued postponement” under the JFK Act, Ferriero stated that “there is insufficient time for [NARA] and the pertinent agencies to . . . identify those certain, specific instances.”
The archivist’s reservations put Trump in a dilemma. Trump’s October 26 memo made the best of this situation, emphasizing the first two releases of JFK records with its metaphor of “lifting the veil.” However, the memo also made clear that Trump was not happy at authorizing a further six month postponement.
Trump’s memo specifically rejected any sort of short list: “I am ordering agencies to re-review each and every one of those redactions over the next 180 days. At the end of that period, I will order the public disclosure of any information that the agencies cannot demonstrate meets the statutory standard for continued postponement of disclosure.”
Round Two: The 2018 Releases
NARA’s FOIA documents show that the redo mandated by Trump began immediately. Some material originally proposed for postponement came out in November and December. FBI releases at this time were particularly extensive. At the three month mark, in late January 2018, letters from NARA’s Bosanko were sent to remind each D/A of postponement criteria and deadlines for release.
The redo had its effect, and archivist David Ferriero wrote again to Trump on 26 March 2018 that an addition 5,821 records were being released in full. In addition, a comparison of records released in 2017 with the 2018 releases shows that thousands of additional pages were released in records that retained some redactions.
Ferriero’s letter to Trump was released in 2020, but D/A release statements from the Department of State, the Department of Defense, the DEA, the FBI, and last but not least, the CIA, were all withheld. These statements are all available in the new FOIA documents.
CIA’s release statement is particularly interesting. It was personally signed by CIA director Mike Pompeo, the only D/A head to do so. His letter was accompanied by a lengthy statement justifying the agency’s postponement request. The statement, labeled “Intelligence Brief,” noted that “On 16 May 2017, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (DCIA) requested that the president certify the need for the continued postponement of the public disclosure of certain categories of information” in the CIA’s JFK records. From the context, it is clear that this was a written, not verbal, request.
The brief argued that release of certain categories of information could reveal the names and addresses of still living individuals, including CIA personnel and “intelligence assets,” who would be endangered by such releases. In addition, the brief claimed, such an outcome “may limit the willingness of other people . . . to cooperate with CIA, the Intelligence Community or the Department of Defense in the future.”
This point was emphasized in Pompeo’s letter to the Archivist. Pompeo wrote, “This submission reflects my personal discussion with the president on 1 November 2017 where he agreed that certain sensitive intelligence information that could lead to the discovery of names of persons and addresses requires continued withholding beyond 26 April 2018.” Based on this letter, CIA thus zoomed to the top of the redacted docs list.
NARA’s FOIA documents give us a much clearer picture of how JFK record releases were handled in 2017-2018. They show that NARA took its responsibilities under the JFK Act seriously and implemented detailed procedures for handling them. They also show that the NSC strongly supported NARA’s efforts.
The documents illustrate that Trump’s expressed preference for maximum release strongly influenced the extent of D/A postponement requests and NARA’s review of the requests. Trump’s 26 October 2017 memo resulted in the release in full of thousands more records in April 2018, as well as the release of thousands of whole page redactions. Could Trump have released still more? Yes, of course. He could have simply ignored all requests for postponements and ordered a blanket release. But Trump decided not to do this. Biden, too, chose not to do a blanket release. The reasoning behind both presidents’ decisions gets a final word below.
It should be noted that the failure to adopt NARA’s suggestion of a full year to review D/A requests resulted in many records with inconsistent and unnecessary redactions. Overall though, Trump’s decisions were strongly weighted toward opening the records.
Biden’s Turn
Post-2018 record releases occurred under the Biden administration in 2021, 2022, and 2023. Like Trump, Biden chose not to release all of the remaining redactions, but as of August 2023, fewer than 3,000 “section five” records still have redactions, and the amount of text redacted within them is significantly reduced.
How did the release processes under Biden and Trump differ? The Trump administration’s choice was to get records out as quickly as possible, even if redactions were not released in full. The Biden administration, on the other hand, chose to take longer and get as many records as possible released in full.
The release process under Biden was also much more public, with three Biden memos marking each step of the releases. Detailed D/A responses to the memos were posted at NARA, signed not by reviewers or coordinators, but by D/A heads, including the Secretaries of Defense and State, the directors of the CIA and FBI, and the archivist of the United States. Each D/A also provided a written statement of when the next review of the remaining postponements would be held, and conditions to be met for release. These statements, dubbed “Transparency Plans,” were strongly criticized by many JFK researchers, but they are far more concrete than Trump’s April 26 memo, which merely called for another record review in three years.
The Politics of Declassification
Yet another chapter in the record release saga was written when Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. withdrew from the presidential race in August and threw his support behind Trump. One of his ostentatious conditions was that Trump review and release the remaining redactions in the JFK records. Trump agreed, at one point proposing that a commission on assassinations be created to oversee review and release of remaining redactions in the JFK Collection.
This will not happen unless the JFK Act is amended to permit it. Without new legislation, Trump will retain the ultimate authority to review and release records. Will he do it wholesale? Some may doubt it, but based on his track record, Trump is likely to make a big show of releasing some previously-redacted record.
The political profit is obvious, and despite repeated reviews over the years, there is some low-hanging fruit, i.e., inconsistent redactions in the ARC. Officially releasing information already released in other records would be relatively easy. There are also hundreds of whole-page redactions left in CIA records. A really tough review could produce many new releases of these documents.
Yet, despite all his bluster and braggadocio, Trump is not likely to order a blanket release of all remaining redactions. Most are obviously irrelevant to the JFK assassination, and the controversy their release would evoke promises little or no political profit. In fact, it would only underscore his reckless disregard for justifiably classified information.
A blanket release, for example, would include hundreds of records that redacted the social security numbers of living persons. The FBI has redacted information on still living Mafia and national security informants. The CIA has redacted names of living employees and agents in a significant number of records, and this has long been a major sticking point for the release in full of CIA records. If Trump 2.0 were to insist on releasing names and the personal information of living persons, expect a stormy response and again, little or no credit because the records will have no bearing on the Kennedy assassination.
There are also strategic military records in the collection. More than one hundred NSA records still have signals intelligence (SIGINT) data redacted. Release of these records is fraught with difficulties. One Department of Defense record redacts nuclear yields of weapons carried by US bombers (three discrete numbers in a 23-page record). This data was reviewed by a DOD working group that oversees release of US strategic nuclear data, and they recommended against release.
“Secret Documents?”
Now wait a minute! What about all those “secret documents” withheld from the public, which have appeared again and again in news reports and on internet blogs? For the nth time: there aren’t any. Except for whole page redactions (now limited to only about 60 records), redactions hold back only words and phrases, names, places, and numbers.
For those who bother to go through the mind-numbing effort of looking at all the documents still redacted, the tiny volume of text redacted in these, and its general lack of relevance to the JFK assassination, will be starkly clear. The JFK Act requires release of all this information, but there are significant obstacles to a blanket release of records, even for Trump 2.0.
Robert Reynolds is a professor in literature and linguistics at National Chi Nan University in Taiwan. He has written about the JFK Assassination Records Collection for the last seven years on his website, jfkarc.info.
[1] This article provides direct links to documents cited in the text. For a list of all documents cited, including new FOIA records, readers may refer to this page on my website. For details on the JFK Act and the ARRB, see the ARRB final report. For details of the seven 2017-2018 JFK releases, see Rex Bradford’s important article at the Mary Ferrell Foundation website, available here.
©2025 by Robert Reynolds
Thanks for the good work, Robert. Seems like there is still a way to go with these records.
Kenneth Meyer
Posted by: Kenneth meyer | 02 February 2025 at 03:50 AM