Sixty-two years after former U.S. president John F. Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas, Texas, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said in a statement that it has discovered approximately 2,400 new records related to his assassination.
As first reported by Axios, the records were apparently never submitted to the board responsible for divulging and reviewing relevant documents.
On January 23, U.S. President Donald Trump issued an executive order directing the release of further documents pertaining to JFK’s assassination, in addition to the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and JFK’s brother, Robert F. Kennedy.
In response to the executive order, said the FBI, they performed a new search of the JFK records, resulting in their new find.
“The search resulted in approximately 2,400 newly inventoried and digitized records that were previously unrecognized as related to the JFK assassination case file,” the bureau said in a statement.
As of this writing, there are no specifics about the new records; it’s unclear if the discovery will shed light or provide further evidence or theories about what happened to JFK. The FBI plans to turn over the documents to the National Archives and Records Administration in an “ongoing declassification process.”
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Speaking to reporters on Jan. 23, Trump said, “everything will be revealed.”
Trump had promised during his re-election campaign to make public the last batches of still-classified documents surrounding president Kennedy’s assassination, which has transfixed people for decades. He made a similar pledge during his first term, but ultimately obeyed appeals from the CIA and FBI to keep some documents withheld.
Only a few thousand of the millions of governmental records related to the assassination of president Kennedy have yet to be fully declassified. And while many who have studied what’s been released so far say the public shouldn’t anticipate any earth-shattering revelations, there is still an intense interest in details related to the assassination and the events surrounding it.
Kennedy was fatally shot in downtown Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, as his motorcade passed in front of the Texas School Book Depository building, where 24-year-old assassin Lee Harvey Oswald had positioned himself from a sniper’s perch on the sixth floor. Two days after Kennedy was killed, nightclub owner Jack Ruby fatally shot Oswald during a jail transfer.
The documents released over the last several years offer details on the way intelligence services operated at the time, and include CIA cables and memos discussing visits by Oswald to the Soviet and Cuban embassies during a trip to Mexico City just weeks before the assassination. The former Marine had previously defected to the Soviet Union before returning home to Texas.
There are still some documents in the collection though that researchers don’t believe Trump will be able to release. Around 500 documents, including tax returns, weren’t subject to the 2017 disclosure requirement. And, researchers note, documents have also been destroyed over the decades.
— With files from The Associated Press
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