A hearing today on declassification of documents pertaining to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, chaired by Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna (D-VA), focused on the lack of access to documents related to the JFK assassination.
00:00:30.000There was a hearing today on the U.S. House Task Force on declassification of the documents pertaining to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy,
00:00:44.880ably chaired by Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna.
00:00:48.700Shortly after JFK was murdered, the new president, Lyndon Johnson, actually resisted the idea of a national commission to investigate Kennedy's murder.
00:01:00.300He initially wanted a Texas state commission.
00:01:03.200He wanted Supreme Court Justice Tom Clark, who was a crony of his, to chair it.
00:01:08.840Listen to LBJ's conversation with J. Edgar Hoover.
00:01:13.460Here's President Johnson talking to Hoover on Monday the 25th about how to proceed with the investigation.
00:01:22.980Apparently, some lawyer and justice is lobbying with the Post because that's where the suggestion came from to this presidential commission, which we think would be very bad.
00:01:35.040We can't be checking up on every shooting straight in the country, but they've gone to the Post now to get them an editorial.
00:01:46.160The Post is calling up and saying they're going to run an editorial if we don't do things.
00:01:49.360President Johnson's plan was to have two simultaneous but coordinated investigations by Hoover's FBI and the Texas Attorney General, Wagoner Carr.
00:02:01.520Johnson was absolutely against appointing a presidential committee.
00:02:06.220It's hard to not be taken aback by Johnson referring to the assassination of his predecessor just three days earlier as a shooting scrape.
00:02:17.500We can't be checking up on every shooting scrape in the country.
00:02:25.940Johnson's point was that he didn't want to involve the White House in the investigation, but the way he talks about it is perhaps a window into what he really thought about President Kennedy.
00:02:42.960Larry Schnapp is, as I say, an attorney, adjunct professor of New York Law School, one of the leading researchers and experts on the Kennedy assassination and the effort to learn more about it through greater transparency.
00:03:00.360So, listen, it was your letter that first brought my attention to the fact that the president's order, while extremely well-intentioned, was probably actually too narrowly written.
00:03:14.900It really suggests that the National Archives release everything in the John F. Kennedy assassination records collection.
00:03:23.740But the federal government has a lot more documents than that, and there are many important things missing.
00:03:30.460Tell us about that, and then tell us about today's hearing.
00:03:33.900Okay, well, the president's executive memo, I believe that they didn't realize what they were writing because it did say that he didn't say –
00:03:44.820The president made a finding that it was in the public interest, which is the terminology used in the statute, the JFK records assassination statute, that it was the public interest that all of the records in the possession of the federal government be released.
00:04:01.140Now, the way the order was then written, it looked like he was referring to the records that were in the collection that is maintained by the National Archives.
00:04:16.380Back in the 90s, the Records Review Board basically got all the records from the agencies, and then they were transferred to the National Archives.
00:04:26.420But when the Review Board went out of business in 1998, their work wasn't done.
00:04:32.940Congress had just decided it wasn't going to fund them anymore, and there were outstanding search requests.
00:04:38.400So what I've been trying to do is to try to alert the people that were tasked by the executive order to comply with it,
00:04:49.360that we're not just talking about the records that are in the collection that are classified.
00:04:54.180We're talking about the records that were never put in the collection.
00:04:57.880So, for example, we had the Joe Anides files.
00:05:02.040George Joe Anides was a covert agent for the CIA.
00:05:06.280He was responsible for the Cuban exile group, the DRE.
00:05:11.240They're the ones that – their representatives came in contact with Oswald in August of 1963 when they had the street fight.
00:05:18.260And then they're the ones that came out with Oswald's biography within hours of the assassination.
00:12:20.020Multiple doctors say in that stunning documentary that they saw wounds in JFK consistent with his being shot from the front and the back.
00:12:30.460But most importantly, two things, that several doctors say that the wound in his throat was not an exit wound,
00:12:37.380it was an entry wound from the front, and secondarily that they were all threatened by the FBI not to discuss anything they had seen in the room where the autopsy was performed.
00:12:52.380To me, when you add that to the fact that we know definitively that Lee Harvey Oswald had been subject to a paraffin test by the Dallas Police Department,
00:13:05.660which did not indicate that he had any nitrate burns, no powder burns on his chest, his arms, his hands, or his cheeks,
00:13:12.580indicating that he did not fire a weapon that day.
00:13:18.160Perhaps this is why he says when he, it's very unlikely that they tried him out in public, and he says what?
00:17:02.600He's an attorney and one of the most prominent figures in the country in the ongoing efforts to declassify and release government documents relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
00:17:13.860Larry has sued the Biden administration and the National Archives several times because he believes that full disclosure of these documents is vital to understanding the events surrounding the assassination and to address the learning questions and conspiracy theories.
00:17:32.260When we left off, you were talking about Arlen Specter, who I knew extremely well, actually ran his campaign for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, had many vigorous arguments over his cockamamie single bullet theory, logistically impossible, by the way, over cocktails.
00:17:50.520But you were talking about his intimidating, the Parkland doctors.
00:17:57.780Well, first, before I get to that, one thing I want to mention, Dr. Curtis also said, was that his supervisor, Dr. Walker, when he saw him the Monday after the assassination, you know, they talked about what they had seen in the ER.
00:18:12.040And Dr. Walker had told Dr. Curtis that he had saw a temple wound in the right temple.
00:18:17.680And that Dr. Ronald Jones had told him that another doctor, Dr. Lito Porto, had actually put his pinky into the wound.
00:18:28.420So there were several doctors who saw evidence of a frontal head wound.
00:18:34.000And that has been covered up and glossed over.
00:18:39.440So the first thing, when Earl Warren decides how to conduct the investigation, he instructs all the lawyers that the preliminary interviews are to be not recorded.
00:18:51.700This was a way that they can basically find out who the good witnesses were and the bad witnesses were.
00:18:56.720And then once they do get, they find out, you know, they can select the good ones.
00:19:01.520And then when they would go interview them, they would go off the record if the witness went off the reservation or other tools and ways of intimidating the witnesses.
00:19:11.540One of them also was a perjury trap where the FBI, for example, would take testimony down on the 302 forms.
00:19:20.400And then they would change, they would alter the testimony and ask the person to sign the form and say, well, if you, and they would object to the statement.
00:19:30.060They said, well, you know, lying to a federal officer is a felony.
00:19:32.880So if, you know, if you're, this is the statement you gave, if you're telling us now the statement that's on paper is wrong, you're potentially going to be liable for felony.
00:19:48.580Well, as you know, Warren, Earl Warren, the chief justice, did not want to chair this commission.
00:19:52.720He was trying to get out of it until Lyndon Johnson implied to him that the Russians had been involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy and that it was Earl Warren's duty to chair the commission in order to avoid World War III.
00:20:06.480Of course, we've seen no evidence whatsoever that the Russians or the Cubans, the Cuban government was involved in the murder of John F. Kennedy.
00:20:15.040This is a modern mystery, murder mystery in which the American people are still extraordinarily, I think, intrigued.
00:20:26.240I give huge credit to Anna Polina Luna, the congresswoman from Florida, chairing this task force.
00:20:31.800And also to you, Larry, you've been helpful to the committee with your knowledge.
00:20:36.120I appreciate your joining us today in the Stone Zone.
00:20:39.080Many, many thanks to you for joining us and for our listeners out there.
00:20:44.080Until we meet again, and we're going to continue to cover this Kennedy assassination story because I think there are more twists and turns from the committee.
00:20:53.400Until we meet again, God bless you and Godspeed.