JFK Assassination Expert Reacts to Trump’s Effort to Declassify Files, and What You Should Expect

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You first wrote about the JFK assassination for the Washington Post in the spring of 1995. So that's 30 years of serious reporting on one topic, which is admittedly a vast topic, but still one topic.
Yes. Yeah.
What's it like to see this announcement? I mean, those of us who've been calling for the release of these records for more than a decade, this is a great and promising moment, but there's still pitfalls ahead. And I want to emphasize that, you know, this is not something that can be done with the stroke of a pen.
The powers of these secret agencies are strong, and we actually kind of see their influence even on Trump's statement. So it's important to know, you know, what we've learned in the recent past, kind of the context of these latest developments, and, you know, what is possible under this order.
But a lot is now possible. So that's a great development.
And thank you for saying that because it is complicated. I mean, a president can come in and say, as this president just did, I want to see the documents and I want the public to see the documents.
But there's a distance between that and seeing the documents. So if you wouldn't mind walking us through what the process is for getting this material.
So the president's order, you know, orders a plan within 15 days from four top officials, two of whom are acting and two of whom are Trump appointees, to come up with a plan for declassification. In the president's order, section three of the president's order contains a loophole, which to me could be interpreted as saying the CIA director could overrule any decision that comes out of this declassification effort.
That's a pretty big loophole that needs to be plugged or, you know, disavowed because the agencies cannot have final control over the release of this material, right? They've been resisting full disclosure since the day President Kennedy died. That's the day that the CIA's lies began.
CIA officials began lying about what they knew about Lee Harvey Oswald within hours of President Kennedy's murder. And they've been obfuscating, lying, deceiving, covering up, evading ever since.
So that kind of bureaucratic behavior, it's not going to stop just because President Trump said something on a piece of paper. They are going to continue to fight a rearguard effort to prevent full disclosure of CIA records related to President Kennedy's assassination.
So we need to be vigilant. We need to identify the

documents are important and set some benchmarks to show, is this effort really obtaining the results? Is it really going to be successful at obtaining full JFK disclosure? So you've got the perspective on this question. How many times has the Congress, for example, or previous administrations called for disclosure of these documents.

This is not the first time. No, the 1992 JFK Records Act passed unanimously by Congress.
Think of that, right? When's the last time Congress passed something unanimously? That law said that all JFK records had to be made public within 25 years, except in the rarest of circumstances. That was the language.
So 25 years after 1992, 2017, that deadline arrived. It came to President Trump, and he caved into the CIA's demands for continuing secrecy.
So that was a very clear expression of the will of the people and the will of Congress. And they've just blown the deadline.
They don't really care to be seen. They don't care that people see them violating the law around JFK records.
Yes, clearly they don't. And, you know, they violated even more basic law when they apparently participated in the murder of a sitting president.
So, I mean, these are lawless agencies, obviously. But where are these documents? Do you have any idea? So, well, there's two places.
There's 3,600 plus documents that are held by the National Archives that contain redactions. Those are in the possession.
Those documents should be very easy to review and release quickly if they're serious about declassification and full disclosure. So then those records were identified by the JFK Assassination Review Board in the 1990s, which did a great job of obtaining and declassifying a million pages of JFK records.
So we've had a huge advance in historical knowledge since the 1990s. And what that showed us was the existence of other JFK records that the review board never knew about, often because the CIA deceived them.
So we need a capacity to get those records that are in the National Archives right now, but we also need to go out and get the records that are known to exist that are not yet in that collection. So there's two big bodies of records that are out there, and a serious declassification effort will get both of them.
And I'm assuming that the second set that you refer to are at the CIA? CIA and FBI, yes, and other agencies, too. Will we know whether we've received the entire corpus or not? You know, when we start seeing documents, it's pretty easy to establish some benchmarks about, you know, what are the most important records.
And, you know, we will see in both categories, have those documents come into the record. So, if we monitor the process, we should be able to say, is this serious or not? You know, I think that, you know, the president has ordered a plan in 15 days.
I don't think that means we're going to get documents in 15 days. And so, you know, but if we don't get documents within 30 days of the plan, then you got to start saying this thing has been taken, has gone off the rails.
Well, but they, I mean, it's kind of abrupt. I mean, it's, you know, it's only been 62 years.
haven't had time to kind of prepare everything. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Okay. What's your guess as to why they're holding so tightly? And I can just say, I'm sure you know this, but as of last month, there was pressure in Washington to appoint or not appoint certain people based on the likelihood they would push for declassification of these documents.
In other words, they're federal bureaucrats right now for whom withholding these documents is a high priority. I just think that's amazing.
What do you think that is? I think the only explanation is that the CIA has something to hide and they'd rather be seen as defying the law than releasing the information. I mean, that tells you something right there.
And, you know, we can go into the specifics of, you know, some of the key documents that are out there that are important to be produced soon. But until that happens, you know, we can't be sure that it's going to happen.

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21 Plus, sponsored by Chumba Casino. I mean, not knowing much about the process, but just employing common sense, you'd think, well, you know, 62 years, you've had time to scrub the stuff that's incriminating.

Are we confident that these documents still exist? Yes. I mean, the documents that I'm talking about in the National Archives collection, I mean, they're in the possession of National Archives today.
They could go get them this afternoon. The documents that are not yet in the collection, those are known to exist.
And I mean, known to exist, you know, as of recently. So, you know, if they're not produced, if we find evidence they've been destroyed, then we have pretty good evidence that, you know, that the cover up is continuing.
But these are documents that are known to exist. This isn't a fishing expedition.
This is a search for JFK records that have not been put on the public record by the CIA and the FBI. But whose existence has been verified.
So it's not like it's up to the current leadership of the CIA to define what the documents are. We know what the documents are.
It's a matter of them handing them over. And if they don't hand them over, it'll be because the new CIA director, John Ratcliffe, has said, I don't want to hand him over.
And we'll know that. Yeah.
And, you know, it was interesting to me that in Ratcliffe's confirmation hearings, he was not asked about JFK files, which makes me think that it's not a priority of Tom Cotton and the Senate Intelligence Committee. It seemed like they were staying away from the subject, you know, which, like you noted, had been central to the idea that Amaryllis Fox might take a job at the CIA to oversee this, you know.
So, you know, there's got to be a commitment from Radcliffe to make sure that this happens. And I don't think that he's ever said anything by JFK files.
You may know differently, but I've never seen anything. So he has no position as far as I can tell.
No. I mean, he is a, you know, he's a loyal Trump guy.
And Trump has been talking about this for years. Trump's bitter that he was talked out of releasing those files by Mike Pompeo, former CIA director under him.
He's mad about that. He said that in public.
Yeah. And so I, you know, it's hard for me to believe that Radcliffe would withhold, you know, especially something that we know exists.
I just don't, I just don't see that happening. So, so you're aware of the Amaryllis Fox Kennedy.
Yeah. Behind the scenes.
So will you tell us what you know about that? Well, it's just, you know, I know from the news reports that RFK Jr. floated the idea of having her go to CIA and kind of oversee the process to get to the bottom of the JFK assassination was the quote that I saw.
So, you know, you need to have a bureaucratic point person to ride herd on this because the agencies are going to be very reluctant.

So that's a good idea.

You know, whether it's her, I mean, a former CIA officer, that's somebody who would be qualified, who knows that building and would be able to do that. Somebody else could do it as well.
But you are going to need a point person. The way it's set up now, it looks like NSC advisor Mike Walls will probably be the point person along with the attorney general.
So as that takes shape, you know, that's a key thing is what's the real commitment to ride herd on this as opposed to just issue a piece of paper and then let the bureaucracy do what it does. Right.
It seems like it's going to be kind of hard to get out of it. Yes.
Because there are informed people like and especially you paying attention. Yeah.
I'm a little less confident on the Martin Luther King assassination files. And I think of all of these crimes, there are three.
There's the murder of Bobby Kennedy, the murder of JFK, the murder of MLK. I think that story is, the official story is the least plausible.
I mean, it's actually ridiculous that he was murdered by a prison inmate acting alone, but without a job, but somehow that prison inmate winds up going to Canada, then the UK, then is heading to South Africa with two forged foreign passports. And he did that all by himself? Like, that's just, I mean, come on.
Yeah. And so clearly there was a conspiracy to murder Martin Luther King.
I mean, I don't think any normal person thinks otherwise. And certainly.
Who knows the details. So are we going to find, like, what do you think we're going to find there? You know, I don't know those records as well, but the fact that they're secret, I mean, you know, we don't need to argue about the conclusions.
The point is we need the records and then then we can have an informed debate. But right now we have no informed debate, especially about MLK, but even about JFK and RFK.
We don't have all the records. So, you know, the CIA is very good, and its allies in the establishment media are very good at changing the subject and getting us to argue about things that are not really germane.
The point is, the law is very clear. The CIA has blown the deadline, and this material should be made public, all of it.
If it's trivial, so be it. You know, I'm not saying I'm right about how I interpret these records.
Put it out there and you can decide if I'm right. That's right.
What are the chances that we get full disclosure in the next month or two, or what seems like full disclosure, and every media story says,

see, there's nothing there. If we get the documents that I'm talking about,

that will not be a credible narrative. And let me cite a couple of examples, Tucker, because

this isn't a fishing expedition. Okay.
So in one of the key documents that's still redacted,

unbelievably, in my view, is a memo that Arthur Schlesinger wrote to JFK after the Bay of Pigs. Kennedy was very disillusioned with the CIA.
He felt they were trying to dictate policy to him. And he talked about reorganizing the CIA in the words that are often quoted, breaking up the CIA and scattering it to the winds, right? So this was

actually a concrete expression of that impulse. We need to do something about an agency that's out of control.
Arthur Schlesinger writes up his thoughts. He's got a security clearance, does a very careful study of CIA operations.
In that memo to Kennedy, there is still almost an entire page redacted. Okay.
So the CIA is censoring criticism of itself by the White House. And we're not allowed to see that 61 years later.
So Schlesinger's memo, it's not about the events that happened in Dallas. It's about the alienation of Kennedy and the CIA.
That's a very basic test. If we don't get that document, the whole thing's a joke, okay? It's that simple.
But is it legal to criticize the CIA still? Well, that's what this document, it raises the question, right? If somebody knows the contents of that censored page and came to me and said, Jeff, I'll tell you what's in there,

you know, under the law right now, they would be taking a certain legal risk. You know, that's a fact.
And, you know, when a JFK whistleblower approached me a couple of years ago, and I wrote about this on JFK Facts last year, you know, he described to me a secret CIA facility in Northern Virginia, where he had worked as a contractor. And he said, there's a JFK archive in there.
He had seen it. He had talked to the people, to the woman who ran it, who controlled access to it.
He saw what was on the shelves there. So that guy, it was risky for him to talk to me.
And it took a long time for me to convince him to come forward. And he only came forward after a couple of years when he realized nothing was happening.
You know, there was no prospect of the CIA coming clean. So that's important.
I'll tell you something else that's good about President Trump's order. I think it makes it easier for any whistleblowers to come forward.
And I'd like to say if there are people out there who have access to classified information, you know, consult your lawyer. But I think President Trump's order effectively, well, it reduces their risk about talking about things that are classified because the president's saying we want all of this out that carries some weight so um that that it's that in itself is an important development yeah i mean it's i mean when i reported something about the contents of the jfk files two years ago and mike pompeo's lawyer called me next day to threaten me yeah that was um that was an amazing story and and it goes to show you that, you know, talking about this stuff, you can be threatened with legal action.
That's still possible, you know. So, that threat needs to be removed.
And I hope the president's order has done that, you know, and that people can feel that this is perfectly legitimate to talk about. There are no real national security concerns in this material, except for the fact that the assassination of a president is a national security concern, right? Well, sure.
But I mean, if you think that the public's trust in the CIA is a national security imperative, in other words, if people doubt us, Americans will die. I mean, I think that's what they tell tell themselves you know that that preserving myths about their agency um are like you know like a legitimate goal of government yeah and so you know crazy yeah so another story which i reported on jfk facts last year before president kennedy was assassinated in november 1963 the cia CIA had Lee Harvey Oswald under surveillance for four years.
By November 21st, 1963, they had compiled 180 pages of material on Oswald. His personal life, his political beliefs, his contact with a KGB officer, his arrest, they had all of that at the time Kennedy was leaving for Dallas.
CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton knew that Oswald was in the Dallas area in the first week of November of 1963. That pre-assassination Oswald file was not completely declassified until April 2023.
That's how sensitive this is. And they're very good at keeping this stuff off the public record.
And, you know, now, when you go to people in the mainstream media, they won't report on Oswald's pre-assassination file. They'll say, they were just covering their asses.
They make excuses for the CIA instead of saying, hey, you had 180 pages on the guy. You know, was that extreme negligence, intentional negligence or actual complicity, you know? And we don't we don't know.
But that file is the pre-assassination Oswald file is one of the most significant things to come out in recent years, for sure. So was that given over to the investigators of the Warren Commission? No.
When the Warren Commission interviewed CIA Director John McCone and Deputy Director Richard Helms behind closed doors, only Warren Commission members there were Alan Dulles and Gerald Ford, and John Sherman Cooper was there for a little bit. They lied.
I mean, they committed perjury, especially Helms, and said, we didn't have any information about Oswald before the assassination. Minimal information, that was the line.
So in their mind, 180-page file on Oswald, that was minimal information. Pay no attention and don't hold us accountable for, you know, missing the fact that this guy killed the president.
We're sorry, Mrs. Kennedy, but that's just the way life is.
That's their attitude. It's bland arrogance.
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What do you suppose is still being classified from the investigation into Robert F. Kennedy's death? You know, I wrote a book about James Angleton, the counterintelligence chief who ran the Oswald, who held the Oswald file from 1959 to 1963.
Angleton told the church committee kind of off the record that he believed RFK had been killed by organized crime figures. So there's the body of records from the LA Police Department.
The CIA had people in the LAPD who helped control the investigation of the assassination and exclude marginalized witnesses who didn't say what the government wanted said. The RFK documents are a problem because they're not in one place.
And it will take a little bit of effort to collect them. And it's good that the president wrote in 45 days, not 15 days for those documents, because it's going to take a little more work.
That's a reasonable delay in light of, you know, getting, you know, getting, finding and getting and releasing those documents. Do you, how would you assess the likelihood that the murder of Bobby Kennedy was not what they told us it was? A lone nutcase called Sirhan Sirhan shooting him with a 22 in the kitchen in the Abastor Hotel you think there's more there I mean you have you have the the testimony of the coroner who was hyper aware that the JFK autopsy was a joke and a fraud um and and Dr.
Noguchi said that Kennedy's head wound was a contact, that the gun had been close to Kennedy's head when the shot was fired. Well, Sirhan Sirhan was never that close to RFK.
So that alone is kind of indisputable factual evidence of a deficiency at a minimum in the official story. so also I think in the lung and I'm not an expert on RFK's assassination but

when you see how CIA assassination operations worked and the kind of techniques that they use, you can't rule out that Sir Han was under some kind of, you know, mind control program. I mean, they had a mind control program and it was designed to do things like this.
Commit an act and you have no memory of it.

So we know they were working on that technology. Could it have been applied here? That's why we need the records so that we can assess, is that a real possibility? Sirhan Sirhan's in his 80s now.
He's still in prison. He's still alive.
And the one part of his story that's never changed, and it seems credible to me, is that he has no memory of shooting Bobby Kennedy. Yeah, I mean, it's a striking detail.
Yeah, I would say. I mean, you maintain the same story for, you know, almost 60 years.
Yeah, I think it has a little bit more credibility. Final question.
Thank you for taking this time. Since you've been working on this for so long and you did come out of the most prominent of the mainstream media, the Washington Post, have you been slandered as a nutcase conspiracy theorist?

I always wondered, like, what do they do with you exactly?

Because you're not coming from the fringes.

You're coming from the right from the middle of the establishment. I mean, you know, you've been attacked.
Yeah, I mean, the problem that they have is that I don't have a conspiracy theory. So the label of conspiracy theorist just doesn't apply.
And the other thing is, you know, nobody can deny the stuff that I'm talking about. Let me mention another JFK document that's very important, and I think interest you.
One of the things that's withheld and is in the JFK collection right now is the testimony of James Angleton in 1975 to the Church Committee about the Israeli nuclear program. This is a 113-page document, and it's heavily redacted to this day, And the redactions clearly pertain to Israel.
Now, is this an assassination-related document? Absolutely. The Assassination Records Review Board said this is an assassination-related document.
It meets the statutory definition. Okay? If the president and this effort are serious, that testimony will be declassified because Angleton controlled the Oswald file on the one hand, and he was a contact with the Israelis on the other.
So it belongs in the public record. That's another test of is this serious effort.
So let me ask you, why in the world would the Demona project, the Israeli nuclear program, which has never officially been admitted by anybody but Israel, what would that conceivably have to do with the assassination of JFK? Well, it relates to what Angleton was doing in 1963, okay? There were profound conflicts between Israel and the Kennedy White House over the nuclear program. Kennedy was pressing for on-site inspections, which the Israelis resisted because on-site inspections would have realized that they had a bomb-making program.
So this was a real bone of contention between the Israeli government and the Kennedy administration in the summer of 1963 at a time when Angleton controlled the Oswald file. So just the juxtaposition of those facts means that everything about it should be on the public record.
And Angleton, who was the counterintel chief at CIA, James Jesus Angleton, he – that's quite amazing. Did he support – do you know his view of the Israeli nuclear program? I mean, it's very hard to tell sometimes from this testimony given all the redactions.
But yeah, that's – was he secretly supporting Israel against JFK? That's one of the questions that needs to be answered by full disclosure. So why would he be asked about that in a congressional hearing? That's quite amazing.
Well, because in 1975, the CIA had been revealed to be running assassination programs, to be running a mind control program, to be spying on the anti-war movement, spying on Americans. So, you know, he was hauled before and Congress, who was completely in the dark, had been duped or wanted to be duped.
You know, suddenly their eyes woke up and they had to explain to their constituents, hey, what have these guys been doing in our name? And so, Angleton was called in and this was all, you know, executive session

testimony. So, he was grilled about lots of things, about domestic spine, about the Israeli

nuclear program, about the JFK assassination. Interestingly enough, he was not questioned

about Oswald because even the church committee did not know the extent of the pre-assassination surveillance of Oswald. That's only something we've learned since the 1990s.
It is interesting. I mean, I have no idea what the truth is, of course, but it is interesting that one of the only major policy changes that Lyndon Johnson made in the year after the president's murder was, you know, on the Israeli nuclear program, which he accepted.
Yeah, basically he dropped the demand for on-site inspections. He dropped the demand that AIPAC be classified as a domestic lobby.
And, you know, there was really no accountability after that. And the story only emerged, you know, 10 years later when the church committee started pressing Angleton for some explanations.
So I had no idea until you just told me that that was actually a feature of those hearings. And so, of course, I mean, the public has – the American public has an absolute right to know what's in that exchange 50 years later.
Yeah, and this is a tough call for the president because he's going to get very strong pushback from his national security apparatus supported by the CIA, supported by Israeli interests to say, no, you can't talk about that. That's not permitted.
You know, you can't, don't do that. Yeah, it's just, it's frustrating as an American citizen, I don't have any kind of real agenda here other than it's, you know, my country, I'm a shareholder in America, as are you, and I think we have an absolute moral right and a legal right to know this 50 years later.
So, well, I really appreciate your taking all this time, Jefferson Morley, and I hope you don't mind if we check in with you, you know, to see if the promise is fulfilled. Like I say, there's some very clear benchmarks to figure out, is this working or not? And, you know, are people holding up the process and obstructing the president's wishes? Or are they, you know, are they really going along? And so the proof is in the pudding.
You know, the president's sentiment is great. It's great that a president has committed to this.
It's amazing that no president has committed in this way before, but we'll take it. I'm not a supporter of President Trump, but on this issue, he's absolutely right, and we need to follow through on what he said.

Amazing. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Tucker. Let's talk again.

Thank you.

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