There are a number of ways to illustrate the unusual degree of responsiveness of the current Trump administration, especially as compared to their predecessors. You could, for example, point to how the White House struck a deal with El Salvador to house illegal alien gang members, and then deported those gang members in a matter of days — before a federal judge could stop them. Similarly, the White House ended Hunter Biden’s Secret Service detail within about 24 hours of discovering that he still had one. President Trump also announced he was invalidating Joe Biden’s pardons, just a couple of days after an investigation revealed that Biden’s signature was being rubber-stamped with an Autopen on pretty much every document he signed while in office. These are the kinds of quick, decisive actions that — whether you agree with them or not — are not typical of most administrations.
But maybe the clearest example of the level of responsiveness we’re getting from the White House came last night, when the administration released more than a thousand of the so-called “JFK Files” on the internet, totaling more than 30,000 pages. These are declassified files relating to the assassination of President Kennedy that have never been seen before, and that should never have been classified in the first place.
On Monday, during a visit to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Trump announced that he would be disclosing these files within 24 hours. He said he was going to make good on his promise, which he first outlined in an executive order in January, to ensure the, “complete release of records relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.” Watch:
True to Trump’s word, this is exactly what began to take place on Tuesday night. Attorneys with the National Security Division of the DOJ pulled an all-nighter, going through various documents. They responded to Trump’s directive immediately. And yesterday, many of these files were released. Apparently more files are coming today, and what we have isn’t the final set of documents.
Even so, there is some new information here that’s worth talking about. But the first thing you notice, as you look through the materials, is how obscenely over-broad our classification system is. One of the previously-classified documents, for example, is an article from the magazine “Ramparts,” which hasn’t been published since the 1970s.
Kennedy Files
The article may be difficult to read, but it states, “The day after the assassination, [CIA agent] Gary Underhill left Washington. … A small clique within the CIA was responsible for the assassination, he confided, and he was afraid for his life and would probably have to leave the country. Less than six months later Underhill was found shot to death in his Washington apartment. The coroner ruled it a suicide.”
There’s no independent verification in these JFK Files, that I’ve seen at least, that corroborates any of this. It’s just a copy-paste from a publicly available article in some magazine that no one’s heard of. But it was marked “SECRET,” and CIA employees were told not to copy it.
This is the kind of thing that might seem trivial, but recall that the DOJ attempted to imprison Donald Trump for allegedly storing “classified” information at Mar-a-Lago. If the intelligence agencies are going to abuse their classification authority to such an extent, then they shouldn’t be able to prosecute political candidates for storing materials that are supposedly “classified.” That seems like a fair compromise, going forward. But the ideal solution is to do what the Trump administration is doing, which is to declassify everything they can. Most of it, as we’re finding out, simply isn’t that interesting. And it’s certainly not worth jailing people over.
That said, as you dig through the JFK files — and again, this is all preliminary, because there’s so much to go through — you do begin to find some interesting information. Some of this was already out there, in some capacity, but now we have a bunch of mostly un-redacted documents in one place. For instance, in mid-December of 1963, shortly after Kennedy’s assassination, the CIA issued a telegram about Castro’s attitude toward the United States. It’s two pages long:
Kennedy Files
Kennedy Files
The telegram begins by quoting a “high-level Cuban diplomat in Western Europe” — someone who the CIA has deemed highly reliable — as saying that Castro was “very upset” about the fact that Kennedy had been replaced. That’s because, “TOP CUBAN LEADERSHIP WAS SURE PRESIDENT KENNEDY WOULD NOT INVADE CUBA,” and also because Cuba determined that Kennedy’s economic blockade of Cuba would not overthrow Castro’s regime.
Then the telegram concludes with this line: “ACCORDING TO CUBAN GOVERNMENT LEADERS, CASTRO WANTS TO WAIT AND SEE WHAT PRESIDENT JOHNSON SAYS AND DOES ABOUT CUBA, AND GIVE HIM AN OPPORTUNITY TO IMPROVE, IF HE FEELS SO INCLINED, RELATIONS BETWEEN THE TWO COUNTRIES.”
In other words, the perception of Cuba’s government — even after the Bay of Pigs — was that Kennedy would never attempt a full-scale invasion. At the same time, they weren’t so sure that Kennedy’s replacement — or the CIA — would be as reluctant. And as you read further in the JFK files, that seems like a reasonable concern.
Kennedy Files
Some of the documents, for example, show that Cuban diplomats immediately concluded that the CIA had killed Kennedy: “If the Yankees or CIA assassinated Kennedy to resume the assault on Cuba, then a third world war would start.” Then there are statements from an American official indicating that assets connected to a CIA agent had spread “misinformation” about Cuba’s involvement in the assassination. So no one involved in the scenario believed the lone gunman theory, at any point.
Meanwhile the CIA was drawing up various plans to attack Cuba — plans that presumably had a better chance of being implemented with Kennedy out of the way. Take a look at this previously classified file, in which the CIA talks about their plans to destroy crops in Cuba:
Kennedy Files
If the document is a little difficult to read, it states: “Plans for inducing the failure of crops will be submitted by 15 February. These plans will envisage both the use of controlled assets who can be infiltrated and exfiltrated, and the provision of encouragement and guidance to the resistance, so that it will undertake acts of sabotage, some of which are to be directed against crops, particularly rice.” Separately, the CIA discussed efforts to sabotage Cuba’s nickel supply using various methods, including “open attack.”:
Kennedy Files
They also discuss the use of “torpedos and mines” as well as attacks on “primary and secondary sources of Cuban nickel.” These attacks would apparently be carried out by “external assets.” Additionally, the CIA wrote about efforts to deploy a large number of spies to Cuba, while pretending they’re students.
Kennedy Files
Then there’s this noteworthy passage, in which the CIA admits that it’s staged “mass demonstrations” all over the region.
Kennedy Files
So they pretty much orchestrated mass demonstrations at will, in nearly a dozen countries. And reading that memo, it’s not hard to conclude that the CIA never stopped doing this. You’re not crazy for concluding that, any time you see a mass protest movement anywhere in the world, there’s a very good chance that the CIA was involved. Think about the so-called “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine that led to conflict with Russia that, as we all know, has ended in open warfare.
Moving on through the Files, there’s also this previously classified memo from June of 1961. It was written by Arthur Schlesinger, a close advisor to JFK:
Kennedy Files
Kennedy Files
This is a memo that’s already been discussed publicly in other contexts. But the idea of the memo — which was written just a couple of years before Kennedy was murdered — was that the CIA has essentially gone rogue. They’re running their own foreign policy. And therefore, according to Schlesinger, the CIA should be split up. Again, you can maybe see why this was classified at the time. But the idea that it should’ve been hidden for decades is obviously absurd. There was never any reason to hide information like this from the public for so long.
There are many more files no one has been able to review at this point. Again, it’s too much information at the moment and some of the information is still incomplete.
Summing up his findings on this first batch of files, the writer Gerald Posner wrote:
I don’t see the tax files of Lee Harvey Oswald or Jack Ruby. Nothing yet on the some of the grand jury proceedings from New Orleans’ District Attorney James Garrison’s miscarriage of justice. Maybe I’m running on empty and missing them, but they are not popping up. … There are some files I have been looking forward to, one called Special Intelligence Package. It includes 37 blank pages and might tell us more about what Mexican intelligence sent to the CIA about Oswald after the assassination. I don’t see that in today’s release. There are other CIA documents I was hoping to see, maybe they will be in tomorrow’s release.
We’ll obviously be awaiting those documents and reviewing them when they become available. The same is true for the next release of the Epstein files that we’ve been promised. But already, based on what’s been released so far, it’s clear that the Trump administration has truly been — as they promised — extraordinarily transparent. In fact, you can make the case that Trump is possibly the single most radically transparent politician in American history, even aside from these document releases. I’ve already lost track of the number of times he’s taken questions from the press since being inaugurated. You don’t get the sense that Trump cares to hide anything from the public.
The contrast between him and Biden on this point couldn’t be more stark. In fact, it’s not just a contrast with Biden. The reflex of every public official in my lifetime has been to hide things and lie even when there’s no obvious strategic benefit in it. On the other hand, Donald Trump, without being prompted, will walk out to the press and announce a historic de-classification document dump. And then the next day, his administration will deliver it.
Can we expect to learn from these documents, with certainty, who exactly killed JFK? Probably not. It’s simply been too long, if we’re being honest. At the same time, at this point, there’s no reason to believe that the Trump administration is responsible for hiding that information from the public. And that’s significant, for a lot of reasons. We have far more insight into how our intelligence agencies operate than ever before. As a result, we can assume that these agencies are now probably a lot less likely to even think about assassinating domestic political targets — because if they do that, they run a very high risk of exposure. They certainly run a higher risk of exposure than they did under the Biden administration, when assassins were taking potshots at Trump, and the federal government didn’t even pretend to care. This is the value of transparency. And, less than three months into his term, as much as it probably drives the CIA crazy, Donald Trump is delivering it.
