The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation found thousands of new documents related to the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy after President Donald Trump called for the release of classified intelligence and law enforcement files about the 1963 shooting.
In a statement on Tuesday, the FBI said it conducted a new records search after Trump signed an order in January during his first week in office related to the release. That search resulted in about 2,400 newly inventoried and digitized records that were previously unrecognized as related to the Kennedy assassination case file, it said.
"The FBI has made the appropriate notifications of the newly discovered documents and is working to transfer them to the National Archives and Records Administration for inclusion in the ongoing declassification process," the FBI said.
Last week the Office of the Director of National Intelligence sent recommendations to Trump on which classified documents he should release to the public on the assassination, a spokesperson told Reuters on Tuesday. The office did not release details of the plan or say when the documents would be released.
The fascination over the assassination of JFK, as the 35th U.S. president is known, endures six decades after the event.
Trump, who returned to the White House in January, had promised on the campaign trail to release documents about the assassination.
Kennedy's murder in Dallas, Texas, had been attributed to a sole gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald. The Justice Department and other federal government bodies reaffirmed that conclusion in the intervening decades. But polls show many Americans believe his death was a result of a wider conspiracy.
As part of the same executive order, Trump also promised to release documents on the assassinations of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. and Senator Robert Kennedy, both of whom were killed in 1968. Trump has allowed more time to come up with a plan for those releases.
Trump's pick to lead the Health and Human Services Department, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the son of Robert Kennedy and nephew of John F. Kennedy, has said he believes the Central Intelligence Agency was involved in his uncle's death, an allegation the agency has described as baseless. Kennedy Jr. has also said he believes his father was killed by multiple gunmen, an assertion that contradicted official accounts.
Conspiracy theories continue
Documents may reveal details about a gripping moment in U.S. history, but historians say they are unlikely to bolster any of the conspiracy theories surrounding JFK's 1963 shooting in Dallas.
"I suspect that we won't get anything too dramatic in the releases, or anything that fundamentally overturns our understanding of what occurred in Dallas," said Fredrik Logevall, a Harvard history professor and one of four historians interviewed by Reuters. He added that he was prepared to be surprised.
One revelation the documents could contain is that the CIA was more aware of Oswald than it has previously disclosed. Files revealing that the CIA failed to share intelligence on Oswald with the FBI would be "a big story," said Gerald Posner, author of "Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK," which concludes that Oswald acted alone.
"The question for me is not whether the CIA was complicit, but whether the CIA was negligent," Posner said.
Posner said questions remain about what the CIA knew about Oswald's visits to Mexico City six weeks before the assassination. During that trip, Oswald visited the Soviet embassy.
Posner added that his top questions on the 2,400 new files are: What are they and how did it take the Bureau 62 years to find them?
Barbara Perry, co-director of the presidential oral history program at the Miller Center, an affiliate of the University of Virginia, said the CIA may have been following Oswald.
"Certainly the FBI was, but they didn't connect the dots," Perry said. "But it wasn't a conspiracy on the part of the CIA or the FBI or any outside country."
The release, however extensive, will likely leave some discrepancies in the body of knowledge regarding the assassination, said Alice L. George, author of "The Assassination of John F. Kennedy: Political Trauma and American Memory." So conspiracy theories are expected to endure.
"I can't imagine any document that would convince (conspiracy theorists) that Oswald acted alone," George said. "Particularly among people who are really invested in that way of thinking. It's going to probably leave them in the same place where they are now."
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