Donald Trump vowed to release all remaining JFK files. What could they contain?

After independent US presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy jnr suspended his campaign and endorsed Donald Trump on Friday, the Republican nominee pledged that if he’s elected to the White House, he will release all the documents related to the 1963 assassination of Kennedy’s uncle.

“This is a tribute in honour of Bobby,” Trump said at a Friday evening rally in the Phoenix area.

“I will establish a new independent presidential commission on assassination attempts, and they will be tasked with releasing all of the remaining documents pertaining to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.”

For decades after the killing, many documents related to the event were withheld from the public, spurring conspiracy theories.

The Warren Commission, which was created a week after John F. Kennedy’s death in November 1963, said that gunman Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in Dallas.

But others have continued to question whether Oswald worked with Soviet, Cuban or CIA agents. Robert F. Kennedy jnr told a New York radio station last year that he believes the CIA was involved in his uncle’s murder.

Congress passed a law more than three decades ago intended to put to rest questions about the assassination by declassifying relevant records, but there remain more than 3000 documents that still contain redactions, according to the National Archives and Records Administration, leaving some researchers puzzled.

When were the documents supposed to be released?

The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 declared that all the documents about the assassination should be made publicly available by October 2017. However, the law allowed US officials to postpone the release of documents if they thought national security and privacy concerns outweighed the public interest in disclosure.

Roughly 320,000 documents were identified and slated to be declassified after the law passed.

The law was signed the year after the release of director Oliver Stone’s political thriller JFK, a fictional portrayal of a New Orleans district attorney who found evidence of a conspiracy behind Kennedy’s death.

President John F. Kennedy in 1963.

What documents remain hidden?

US officials have cited privacy and national security concerns multiple times for postponing the release of some documents.

When he was President in 2017, Trump announced that he planned to publicly disclose the remaining documents but ultimately delayed the release of some files for national security reasons, saying they would be released by October 2021. In 2018, Trump authorised the disclosure of 19,045 documents, many of which contained redactions.

In October 2021, President Joe Biden also postponed the planned release of the documents, citing delays prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic.

“Temporary continued postponement is necessary to protect against identifiable harm to the military defence, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or the conduct of foreign relations that is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in immediate disclosure,” Biden said at the time.

Biden released more than 13,000 documents in the following years, but in June 2023, he announced that he had made his “final certification” on files to be released, transferring his power to disclose documents to US agencies.

Gerald Posner, who wrote the 1993 Kennedy assassination book Case Closed, said he wasn’t sure whether Trump will follow through on his promise if he’s elected in November.

“You had an opportunity to do it, you said you were going to do it, and you didn’t do it,” Posner said about Trump. “Now, with the RFK junior endorsement, maybe that’s a quid pro quo, and maybe this time he’ll actually do it.”

Robert F. Kennedy jnr (left) and Donald Trump shake hands during a campaign rally. Photo / Getty Images

What revelations have been gleaned from documents released in recent years?

Tens of thousands of documents were released between 2018 and last year. The last large batch of released documents came in December 2022, when Biden disclosed 13,173 documents.

Jefferson Morley, the editor of the JFK Facts newsletter, said a few revelations have arisen from those releases. The documents showed that some CIA employees didn’t believe Oswald acted alone, Morley said, and a counterintelligence official tried to “wait out” the Warren Commission’s investigation by denying it information about Oswald.

Posner, however, said that many of the recently released documents haven’t revealed a smoking gun, and he doubts the remaining documents will either.

“Some of the biggest headlines that have been pulled from the JFK files the last four or five years are what I call tabloid stories about stories that were actually old,” Posner said.

Some of the documents released since 2022 shed light on Oswald’s actions in the months before the assassination. One document from June 1962 indicated that Oswald might have been on the CIA’s radar more than a year before Kennedy’s assassination. Another said the CIA intercepted a call Oswald made in October 1963 from Mexico City to the Soviet Embassy there, wanting someone in the building “to send a telegram for him to Washington”.

Last summer, a newly unredacted copy of a document named the CIA employee who intercepted Oswald’s mail before Kennedy’s murder.

What could we learn from the remaining files?

Morley and Posner said they believe the remaining documents might show that the CIA was aware of Oswald before the assassination.

Morley said the evidence released so far leads him to suspect Kennedy’s opponents in the CIA might’ve been working with Oswald and the remaining documents could prove or disprove that theory. Posner said he thinks Oswald acted alone and the remaining documents might show the CIA failed to report him to the FBI before the assassination.

A CIA spokesperson told The Washington Post in 2022 that the agency was not withholding information about Oswald or the assassination.

“CIA believes all substantive information known to be directly related to Oswald has been released,” the spokesperson said. “The few remaining redactions protect CIA employee names, sources, locations, and CIA tradecraft.”

Even if all the Kennedy documents are released, Posner said he doesn’t think the conspiracy theories will end.

“Let’s say it doesn’t add to any evidence of a conspiracy in the case,” Posner said about the unreleased information. “People believing in conspiracy will say, ‘Well, see, there you go. They destroyed the real documents.’”

Despite their differences about what they think happened on November 22, 1963, in Dallas’s Dealey Plaza, both Posner and Morley hope to see the records fully released.

“Is there a smoking gun in there? You know, this is not about a smoking gun,” Morley said. “This is about the law that says all of the Government’s JFK records should be made public by October 2017. We’re seven years past that blown deadline.”