The National Archive has begun to upload the last remaining government files related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy onto the internet. The files represent thousands of ancient pages of government documents, some now indecipherable due to age, that historians and conspiracists have wanted to view for decades.
And in typical Trump fashion, the release has been chaotic and slipshod. The files aren’t organized, summarized, or labeled in a way that makes sense. It’s just raw PDFs with a long numeric string uploaded onto a website. Click the PDF and see what you get. And, according to one lawyer going through them, they include the sensitive personal information of living people.
“The Trump Administration dox’d countless people who served on the staff of the House Select Committee on Assassinations back in 1977-79 by releasing their SSNs in full,” Mark Zaid, an attorney who works on National Security issues, said on Bluesky. “Some of these people are alive. I know them. “This was totally unnecessary & contributed nothing to understanding 11/22/63.”
The pages come thanks to an executive order Trump signed after his inauguration. He’d previously declassified JFK-related documents during his first term in 2017 and said he’d declassify the rest after giving U.S. security services time to go through them.
Around 99 percent of JFK documents were already public thanks to a 1992 push to declassify material. Some of what’s being uploaded to the National Archives website yesterday and today isn’t new, just different versions of old documents with redactions removed or altered.
There were about 3,500 known documents left unsealed for various reasons in 2024 and at the tail end of the Biden administration, the FBI said it had discovered about 2,400 more. If you want to read hard copies of what’s being uploaded you can do that, right now, by taking a trip to the National Archives at College Park in Maryland. Or you can wait for them to finish uploading what they’ve got.
As of this writing, the Archives has uploaded about 60,000 pages spread across more than 2,000 PDF files. Trump has teased that he’s releasing 80,000 pages total. If he’s not lying or wrong, that means there are 20,000 more pages yet to appear across an unknown number of PDFs. The Archives said on its website that it’s working to digitize what it has.
Going through these files will take a lot of time, probably years. Historians and news outlets are pouring over them right now and posting their findings in real-time. The Associated Press has uncovered a memo detailing what the KGB allegedly thought of Oswald as he moved through the Soviet Union.
But real discoveries will take time and people with deep knowledge of the event to process. If you care about the JFK assassination at all, it’s likely you have already decided what to believe about it. Despite six decades of intense madness and conspiracy theorizing, the best evidence tells us that a former Marine and Communist-curious weirdo named Lee Harvey Oswald aimed a rifle out the window of the Book Depository in Dallas and blew up Kenney’s head.
There will be no “silver bullet” memo in the files that refutes this, no master CIA plan written in Allan Dulles’s handwriting that lays out a conspiracy to hire the mafia to kill JFK, no transcribed recording of a Trilateral Commission meeting where they plot against Kennedy, and no details about a second shooter on the Grassy Knoll. This is assured.
On November 22, 1963, a President died in Dallas and ripped open a psychic wound in the heart of America that will never heal. No amount of shoddily released government documents will close the wound. There can be no satisfaction.
