Nearly 62 years after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, researchers are still clamoring for answers, and a new trove of documents is leaving some with more questions than answers.
Approximately 80,000 documents were unsealed by President Donald Trump on Tuesday after he signed an executive order, days after taking office for his second term, directing Justice Department officials to oversee the release of all files related to the killing.
Slightly more than 63,000 are digitized and available online, with the remainder tucked in locked stacks at the National Archives.
The Epoch Times is working with archivists to identify redacted files and recover original, unredacted versions and is now in possession of never-before-seen documents.
Long sought-after records not available online, including former Central Intelligence Agency foreign counterintelligence chief turned Israeli spy James Angleton’s testimony to the Church Committee in 1975, are now under review in the newsroom, with details coming soon.
Mentions of the Israeli intelligence service were previously redacted from all files.
Tension between Kennedy and Israel about the nation’s acquisition of nuclear weapons is but one angle in a multifaceted investigation of motives for the murder.
True crime author and researcher John Leake likened the plot to an Agatha Christie novel.
“Almost everyone implicated had a motive to kill him,” he told The Epoch Times.
Thousands of documents point to intelligence agency activities in Cuba, with plots to overthrow the government using “political and psychological warfare.”
Many of the files reveal intelligence agency operations, methods, and operatives.
Some of the digitized scans are illegible, in part due to original source quality, and in part from poor scanning methods.
Skeptics are concerned that other documents were destroyed before ever deposited in the archives, a notion supported by an archivist assisting with searches for newly declassified files.
One unsealed record shows agency heads directing agents to destroy documents to prevent foreign governments from learning state secrets.
Lee Harvey Oswald, named as the lone gunman by the Waren Commission, was under surveillance by authorities in the United States and Russia, according to several files.
European contacts alerted the Federal Bureau of Investigation on multiple occasions before Kennedy was killed warning of a plot that could include Oswald.
According to one document, Russian spy officials in the KGB called the murder an “elaborate coup” and rejected the idea that Oswald was the sole perpetrator, calling him a “poor shooter.”
The Warren Commission report concluded that Oswald fired three shots with a Carcano rifle within 8.3 seconds, allegedly striking the president twice.
The fate of Gary Underhill, a former intelligence agency operative who fingered the CIA as the orchestrator of the assassination and was subsequently found dead of a reported suicide, is highlighted in one file.
President Lyndon B. Johnson told the spy agency it needed to work on its reputation, saying its “cloak and dagger image” and association with “dirty tricks” was detrimental to the public’s faith in the federal government, according to another document.
Critics of the slow drip of documents over the past decades suggested a cover-up was responsible for the lack of transparency.
Some of those looking for answers found themselves targets of investigations, according to multiple records that show journalists and their families were surveilled for writing about alternative theories.
Now, with tens of thousands of documents to scour over, a host of theories are making their way back into the mainstream, as people look to understand what happened to end the life of a sitting president.
—Travis Gillmore
ALMOST BELL TIME FOR EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
President Donald Trump has dismantled the Department of Education but hasn’t fully eliminated it.
Before a crowd of Republican state governors on March 20, the president signed an executive order eliminating all but three functions of the federal agency—Title I funding for low-income student populations, special education funding, and Pell Grants for income-eligible college students.
He did not say if he would push for the agency’s full elimination, which requires Congressional approval, but quipped that Democrats who oppose these measures would eventually see how moving agency functions to other departments and the states themselves is the best way to improve public education.
“Everybody knows it’s right,” he said.
The agency, the smallest of the federal cabinets, was created under President Jimmy Carter’s administration in 1979. Trump said that at that time, the American Federation of Teachers and some other Democrats in cabinets and Congress opposed the measure.
“History has proven them right, absolutely right.”
Education Secretary Linda McMahon has already cut her staff in half and is working with the Department of Government Efficiency to find additional savings. Even before McMahon’s appointment, DOGE identified more than $1 billion worth of canceled contracts.
Republicans who support Trump’s initiative say more taxpayer dollars will reach local classrooms if the bureaucracy is eliminated. Democrats who oppose the cuts argue that a federal backstop is needed to assure vulnerable students receive a suitable education when many local schools fall short.
Trump’s two-pronged approach to reducing the federal agency so far is unusual.
Policy experts note that the Constitution protects a few functions of the Department of Education that taxpayers don’t hear about often, like tribal schools and classrooms on tax-exempt military installations, neither of which Trump addressed in his executive order.
Although Trump mentioned Pell Grants, he didn’t say anything about the future of student loans—a trillion-plus undertaking of the agency—higher education research funding, or various competitive grant programs for K–12 education.
Either way, the administration expects continued opposition from Democrats and teachers’ unions, which were already complaining that public schools are underfunded.
But the Trump administration is poised to respond that money, given that the United States far outspends other nations in public education but falls behind in standardized test scores, is not the answer to improving classroom instruction and achieving better results.
“That’s where’s we’re at, like it or not, and we’ve been there a long time,” Trump said.
—Aaron Gifford
BOOKMARKS
An iconic Hong Kong billionaire has been labelled a traitor after agreeing to sell the port rights of 43 locations—including the Panama Canal—to a coalition of U.S. businesses. Hong Kong newspaper Ta Kung Pao says 96-year old Li Ka-shing is “selling out the country and the entire Chinese population” and “spinelessly kneeling” before the United States.
New York businessman An Quanzhong has been sentenced to 20 months in prison after harassing an unnamed Chinese dissident, and trying to convince them to repatriate to China. Quanzhong is a permanent U.S. resident, but pleaded guilty last May to acting as an unregistered agent for China.
Following the recent spate of attacks against Tesla electric vehicle dealerships, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi warned that perpetrators of such vandalism will face federal charges. Three individuals accused of recent attacks are already being charged with crimes ranging from arson to malicious destruction of property.
The European Union won’t implement its first round of counter-tariffs against the United States just yet, saying it wants more time to consult member states and negotiate a better deal with Washington. The tariffs were proposed partly in response to Donald Trump’s plan to impose reciprocal tariffs on April 2, charging other nations the same tariff rates they imposed on the U.S.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on Thursday that the Taliban has released George Glezmann, an American citizen held captive since December 2022. Rubio said Glezmann’s release was “positive step,” but “also a reminder that other Americans are still detained in Afghanistan.”
—Stacy Robinson
