Trump has ordered the release of millions of pages of documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the subsequent cover-up by the CIA. What will it take to get these documents declassified? Will it be enough to make them public?
00:01:04.200What's it like to see this announcement?
00:01:07.280I mean, those of us who've been calling for the release of these records for more than a decade, this is a great and promising moment.
00:01:15.480But there's still pitfalls ahead, and I want to emphasize that, you know, this is not something that can be done with the stroke of a pen.
00:01:22.860The powers of these secret agencies are strong, and we actually kind of see their influence even on Trump's statement.
00:01:31.380So it's important to know, you know, what we've learned in the recent past, kind of the context of these latest developments, and, you know, what is possible under this order.
00:01:45.540Thank you for saying that, because it is complicated.
00:01:50.140I mean, a president can come in and say, as this president just did, I want to see the documents, and I want the public to see the documents.
00:01:56.680But there's a distance between that and seeing the documents.
00:01:59.520So if you wouldn't mind walking us through what the process is for getting this material.
00:02:04.480So the president's order, you know, orders a plan within 15 days from four top officials, two of whom are acting and two of whom are Trump appointees, to come up with a plan for declassification.
00:02:19.120In the president's order, Section 3 of the president's order contains a loophole, which to me could be interpreted as saying the CIA director could overrule any decision that comes out of this declassification effort.
00:02:34.060That's a pretty big loophole that needs to be plugged or, you know, disavowed, because the agencies cannot have final control over the release of this material, right?
00:02:44.360They've been resisting full disclosure since the day President Kennedy died.
00:02:49.480That's the day that the CIA's lies began.
00:02:53.020CIA officials began lying about what they knew about Lee Harvey Oswald within hours of President Kennedy's murder.
00:03:04.520So that kind of bureaucratic behavior, it's not going to stop just because President Trump said something on a piece of paper.
00:03:11.620They are going to continue to fight a rearguard effort to prevent full disclosure of CIA records related to President Kennedy's assassination.
00:05:00.640Those documents should be very easy to review and release quickly if they're serious about declassification and full disclosure.
00:05:09.640So then those records were identified by the JFK Assassination Review Board in the 1990s,
00:05:16.320which did a great job of obtaining and declassifying a million pages of JFK records.
00:05:21.660So we've had a huge advance in historical knowledge since the 1990s.
00:05:26.700And what that showed us was the existence of other JFK records that the Review Board never knew about, often because the CIA deceived them.
00:05:37.100So we need a capacity to get those records that are in the National Archives right now.
00:05:43.320But we also need to go out and get the records that are known to exist that are not yet in that collection.
00:05:48.360So there's two big bodies of records that are out there, and a serious declassification effort will get both of them.
00:05:55.320And I'm assuming the second set that you refer to are at the CIA?
00:06:04.040CIA and FBI, yes, and other agencies, too.
00:06:09.020Will we know whether we've received the entire corpus or not?
00:06:12.240You know, when we start seeing documents, it's pretty easy to establish some benchmarks about, you know, what are the most important records.
00:06:22.960And, you know, we will see in both categories have those documents come into the record.
00:06:29.280So if we monitor the process, we should be able to say, is this serious or not?
00:06:35.680You know, I think that, you know, the president has ordered a plan in 15 days.
00:06:41.760I don't think that means we're going to get documents in 15 days.
00:06:45.040And so, you know, but if we don't get documents within 30 days of the plan, then you've got to start saying this thing has been taken, has gone off the rails.
00:06:57.120Well, but they, I mean, it's kind of abrupt.
00:06:59.100I mean, it's, you know, it's only been 62 years.
00:07:01.820Maybe they haven't had time to kind of prepare everything.
00:07:05.680OK, what what's your guess as to why they're holding so tightly?
00:07:11.560And I can just say, I'm sure you know this, but as of last month, there was pressure in Washington to appoint or not appoint certain people based on the likelihood they would push for declassification of these documents.
00:07:24.180In other words, they're federal bureaucrats right now for whom withholding these documents is a high priority.
00:07:33.020I think the only explanation is that the CIA has something to hide and they'd rather be seen as defying the law than releasing the information.
00:07:42.300I mean, that tells you something right there.
00:07:45.460And, you know, we can go into the specifics of, you know, some of the key documents that are out there that that are important to be to be produced soon.
00:07:56.240And but until that happens, you know, we can't be sure that it's going to happen.
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00:10:15.680I mean, not knowing much about the process, but just employing common sense, you'd think, well, you know, 62 years you've had time to scrub the stuff that's incriminating.
00:10:29.460Are we confident that these documents still exist?
00:10:33.020I mean, the documents that I'm talking about in the National Archives collection, I mean, they're in the possession of National Archives today.
00:10:40.020They could go get them this afternoon.
00:10:41.640The documents that are not yet in the collection, those are known to exist and, I mean, known to exist, you know, as of recently.
00:10:51.020So, you know, if they're not produced, if we find evidence they've been destroyed, then we have pretty good evidence that, you know, that the cover-up is continuing.
00:10:59.420But these are documents that are known to exist.
00:11:32.440And, you know, it was interesting to me that in Ratcliffe's confirmation hearings, he was not asked about JFK files, which makes me think that it's not a priority of Tom Cotton and the Senate Intelligence Committee.
00:11:44.780It seemed like they were staying away from the subject, you know, which, like you noted, had been central to the idea that Amaryllis Fox might take a job at the CIA to oversee this.
00:11:55.680You know, so, you know, there's got to be a commitment from Ratcliffe to make sure that this happens.
00:12:01.720And I don't think that he's ever said anything about JFK files.
00:12:05.060You may know differently, but I've never seen anything.
00:12:07.240So he has no position as far as I can tell.
00:12:44.440So will you tell us what you know about that?
00:12:46.420Well, it's just, you know, I know from the news reports that RFK Jr. floated the idea of having her go to CIA and kind of oversee the process to get to the bottom of the JFK assassination was the quote that I saw.
00:13:00.240So, you know, you need to have a bureaucratic point person to ride herd on this because the agencies are going to be very reluctant.
00:13:07.600So that's a good idea, you know, whether it's her.
00:13:11.040I mean, a former CIA officer, that's somebody who would be qualified, who knows that building and would be able to do that.
00:13:19.640But you are going to need a point person.
00:13:21.840The way it's set up now, it looks like NSC advisor Mike Walls will probably be the point person along with the attorney general.
00:13:31.900So as that takes shape, you know, that's a key thing is what's the real commitment to ride herd on this as opposed to just issue a piece of paper and then let the bureaucracy do what it does.
00:14:41.540So are we going to find like what do you think we're going to find there?
00:14:43.720You know, I don't know those records as well.
00:14:48.060But the fact that they're secret, I mean, you know, we don't need to argue about the conclusions.
00:14:53.880The point is we need the records and then then we can have an informed debate.
00:14:58.640But right now we have no informed debate, especially about MLK.
00:15:02.400But even about JFK and RFK, we don't have all the records.
00:15:06.520So, you know, it's the CIA is very good and its allies in the establishment media are very good at changing the subject and getting us to argue about things that are not really germane.
00:15:37.320What are the chances that we get full disclosure in the next month or two or what seems like full disclosure and every media story says, see, there's nothing there?
00:15:48.340If we get the documents that I'm talking about, that will not be a credible narrative.
00:15:54.100And let me and let me cite a couple of examples, Tucker, because.
00:17:18.840If somebody knows the contents of that of that censored page and came to me and said, Jeff, I'll tell you what's in there, you know, under the law right now, they would be taking a certain legal risk.
00:17:31.540But, you know, that's a that's a fact.
00:17:33.840And, you know, when a JFK whistleblower approached me a couple of years ago and I wrote about this on JFK Facts last year, you know, he described to me a secret CIA facility in northern Virginia where he had worked as a contractor.
00:17:48.080And he said, there's a JFK archive in there.
00:18:20.960I'll tell you something else that's good about President Trump's order.
00:18:24.620I think it makes it easier for any whistleblowers to come forward.
00:18:29.140And I'd like to say if there are people out there who have access to classified information, you know, consult your lawyer.
00:18:35.820But I think President Trump's order effectively, well, it reduces their risk about talking about things that are classified because the president saying we want all of this out.
00:18:47.280So that that it's that in itself is an important development.
00:18:51.220Yeah, I mean, it's I mean, when I reported something about the contents of the JFK files two years ago and Mike Pompeo's lawyer called me the next day to threaten me.
00:19:01.460Yeah, that was that was an amazing story.
00:19:03.900And and it goes to show you that, you know, talking about this stuff, you can be threatened with legal action.
00:19:10.700That's still possible, you know, so we that threat needs to be removed.
00:19:15.380And I hope the president's order has done that, you know, and the people can feel that this is perfectly legitimate to talk about.
00:19:22.240There are no real national security concerns in this material, except for the fact that the assassination of a president is a national security concern.
00:19:33.380But I mean, if if you think that the public's trust in the CIA is a national security imperative, in other words, if people doubt us, Americans will die.
00:19:43.200I mean, I think that's what they tell themselves, you know, that that preserving myths about their agency are like, you know, like a legitimate goal of government.
00:19:56.600So another story, which I reported on JFK Facts last year, before President Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, the CIA had Lee Harvey Oswald under surveillance for four years.
00:20:10.860By November 21st, 1963, they had compiled 180 pages of material on Oswald, his personal life, his political beliefs, his contact with a KGB officer, his arrest.
00:20:23.600They had all of that at the time Kennedy was leaving for Dallas.
00:20:28.400CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton knew that Oswald was in the Dallas area in the first week of November of 1963.
00:20:37.680That pre-assassination Oswald file was not completely declassified until April 2023.
00:20:47.800And they're very good at keeping this stuff off the public record.
00:20:50.620And, you know, now when you go to people in the mainstream media, they won't report on Oswald's pre-assassination file.
00:20:59.420They'll say, oh, they were just covering their assets.
00:21:02.000They make excuses for the CIA instead of saying, hey, you had 180 pages on the guy.
00:21:08.080You know, was that extreme negligence, intentional negligence or actual complicity, you know?
00:21:13.720And we don't, we don't know, but that file is, the pre-assassination Oswald file is one of the most significant things to come out in recent years, for sure.
00:21:23.580So was that given over to the investigators of the Warren Commission?
00:21:27.680When the Warren Commission interviewed CIA Director John McCone and Deputy Director Richard Helms behind closed doors, only Warren Commission members there were Alan Dulles and Gerald Ford, and John Sherman Cooper was there for a little bit.
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00:23:30.860You know, I wrote a book about James Angleton, the counterintelligence chief who ran the Oswald, who held the Oswald file from 1959 to 1963.
00:23:42.160Angleton told the Church Committee, kind of off the record, that he believed RFK had been killed by organized crime figures.
00:23:50.120So there's the body of records from the L.A. Police Department.
00:23:56.560The CIA had people in the LAPD who helped control the investigation of the assassination and exclude marginalized witnesses who didn't say what the government wanted said.
00:24:07.900The RFK documents are a problem because they're not in one place, and it will take a little bit of effort to collect them.
00:24:18.640And it's good that the president wrote in 45 days, not 15 days for those documents, because it's going to take a little more work.
00:24:25.220That's a reasonable delay in light of, you know, getting, you know, getting, finding and getting and releasing those documents.
00:24:32.660Hmm. Do you, how would you assess the likelihood that the murder of Bobby Kennedy was not what they told us it was?
00:24:43.200A lone nutcase called Sirhan Sirhan shooting him with a .22 in the kitchen in the Ambassador Hotel.
00:24:50.580Yeah, I mean, you have, you have the testimony of the coroner who was hyper aware that the JFK autopsy was a joke and a fraud.
00:25:00.940And, and Dr. Noguchi said that Kennedy's head wound was a contact wound, that the gun had been close to Kennedy's head when the shot was fired.
00:25:11.360Well, Sirhan Sirhan was never that close to RFK.
00:25:14.320So that alone is kind of indisputable factual evidence of a deficiency at a minimum in the official story.
00:25:23.800So also, I think, you know, in the long, and I'm not an expert on RFK's assassination, but when you see how CIA assassination operations worked and the kind of techniques that they used, you can't rule out that Sirhan was under some kind of, you know, mind control program.
00:25:42.480I mean, they had a mind control program and it was designed to do things like this, commit an act and you have no memory of it.
00:25:49.440So we know they were working on that technology.
00:26:25.580Did, since you've been working on this for so long and you did come out of, you know, the most prominent of the mainstream media, the Washington Post, have you been slandered as a nutcase conspiracy theorist?
00:26:42.180I always wondered, like, what do they do with you exactly?
00:26:44.320Because you're not coming from the fringes, you're coming from the, right from the middle of the establishment.
00:26:51.280Yeah, I mean, the problem that they have is that I don't have a conspiracy theory, so the label of conspiracy theorist just doesn't apply.
00:26:58.500And the other thing is, you know, nobody can deny the stuff that I'm talking about.
00:27:02.720Let me mention another JFK document that's very important and I think will interest you.
00:27:07.540One of the things that's withheld and is in the JFK collection right now is the testimony of James Angleton in 1975 to the Church Committee about the Israeli nuclear program.
00:27:20.500This is a 113-page document, and it's heavily redacted to this day.
00:27:25.960And the redactions clearly pertain to Israel.
00:27:29.840Now, is this an assassination-related document?
00:27:33.140The Assassination Records Review Board said this is an assassination-related document.
00:27:37.660It meets the statutory definition, okay?
00:27:41.060If the president and this effort are serious, that testimony will be declassified because Angleton controlled the Oswald file on the one hand, and he was a contact with the Israelis on the other.
00:27:56.460That's another test of is this serious effort.
00:27:59.920So let me ask you, why in the world would the Dimona Project, the Israeli nuclear program, which has never officially been admitted by anybody but Israel, what would that conceivably have to do with the assassination of JFK?
00:28:17.760Well, it relates to what Angleton was doing in 1963, okay?
00:28:25.000There were profound conflicts between Israel and the Kennedy White House over the nuclear program.
00:28:32.640Kennedy was pressing for on-site inspections, which the Israelis resisted because on-site inspections would have realized that they had a bomb-making program.
00:28:41.860So this was a real bone of contention between the Israeli government and the Kennedy administration in the summer of 1963 at a time when Angleton controlled the Oswald file.
00:28:53.020So just the juxtaposition of those facts means that everything about it should be on the public record.
00:29:01.000And Angleton, who is the counterintel chief at CIA, James Jesus Angleton, he – that's quite amazing.
00:29:12.140Did he support – do you know his view of the Israeli nuclear program?
00:29:16.200I mean, it's very hard to tell sometimes from this testimony given all the redactions.
00:29:23.120But yeah, that's – you know, was he secretly supporting Israel against JFK?
00:29:27.600That's one of the questions that needs to be answered by full disclosure.
00:29:32.860So why would he be asked about that in a congressional hearing?
00:29:38.080Well, because in 1975, the CIA had been revealed to be running assassination programs, to be running a mind control program, to be spying on the anti-war movement, spying on Americans.
00:29:52.100So, you know, he was hauled before and Congress, who was completely in the dark, had been duped or wanted to be duped.
00:30:00.000You know, suddenly their eyes woke up and they had to explain to their constituents, hey, what have these guys been doing in our name?
00:30:06.480And so Angleton was called in and this was all, you know, executive session testimony.
00:30:11.620So he was grilled about lots of things, about domestic spying, about the Israeli nuclear program, about the JFK assassination.
00:30:19.620Interestingly enough, he was not questioned about Oswald because even the church committee did not know the extent of the pre-assassination surveillance of Oswald.
00:30:28.580That's only something we've learned since the 1990s.
00:30:33.660I mean, I have no idea what the truth is, of course, but it is interesting that one of the only major policy changes that Lyndon Johnson made in the year after the president's murder was, you know, on the Israeli nuclear program, which he accepted.
00:30:50.740Yeah, basically he dropped the demand for on-site inspections.
00:30:55.660He dropped the demand that APAC be classified as a domestic lobby.
00:31:01.620And, you know, there was really no accountability after that.
00:31:05.360And the story only emerged, you know, 10 years later when the church committee started pressing Angleton for some explanations.
00:31:12.720So I had no idea until you just told me that that was actually a feature of those hearings.
00:31:19.180And so, of course, I mean, the public has – the American public has an absolute right to know what's in that exchange 50 years later.
00:31:26.640Yeah, and, you know, and this is a tough call for the president because he's going to get very strong pushback from his national security apparatus supported by the CIA, supported by Israeli interests to say, no, you can't talk about that.
00:32:07.200Well, I really appreciate you're taking all this time, Jefferson Morley.
00:32:10.840And I hope you don't mind if we check in with you, you know, to see if the promise is fulfilled.
00:32:16.080Like I say, there's some very clear benchmarks to figure out is this working or not.
00:32:21.560And, you know, are people holding up the process and obstructing the president's wishes or are they, you know, are they really going along?