Bobby.
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Australian Politics
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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 U.S. 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.
What documents remain hidden?
U.S. 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 authorized 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 coronavirus pandemic.
“Temporary continued postponement is necessary to protect against identifiable harm to the military defense, 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 U.S. agencies.
Gerald Posner, who wrote the 1993 Kennedy assassination book “Case Closed,” said he isn’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 Jr. endorsement, maybe that’s a quid pro quo, and maybe this time he’ll actually do it.”
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