The Conspiracy Theorist-in-Chief Will Decide the Fate of Secret Documents on JFK’s Assassination Jefferson Morley and Rex Bradford - AlterNet
go to original June 24, 2017

Trump's Twitter fingers and the Grassy Knoll (WhoWhatWhy)

He’s called global warming a hoax, suggested that Barack Obama was not an American and linked autism to childhood vaccinations. And soon, President Donald Trump, America’s most powerful conspiracy theorist, will decide the fate of more than 113,000 pages of secret documents about the ultimate conspiracy theory: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963.

Ever since JFK was shot and killed on that fateful Friday afternoon in Dallas, theories have abounded about who really did it. The Russians? The Cubans? The CIA? During the 2016 campaign, Trump even claimed, without evidence, that the father of his Republican rival Ted Cruz might have been involved.

Now, on the year marking the 100th anniversary of Kennedy’s birth, the conspiracy theorist in the White House will have to decide whether highly anticipated secret JFK assassination files can be released in October as planned. By law, federal agencies such as the CIA and FBI may contest the release of these records, but in that case, the president would make the final call.

A new forensic investigation reveals that the files are twice as voluminous as previously estimated. Metadata analysis of the government’s JFK database reveals the coming files contain more than 113,000 pages of material, ranging from trivial to sensational. This trove will likely illuminate many of the events leading up to Kennedy’s murder in 1963 and other pivotal episodes in the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

Credit for this goes to the JFK Assassination Records Act of 1992. Passed by the U.S. Congress in the wake of Oliver Stone’s movie, JFK, the law mandated that all assassination-related records in the government’s possession had to be made public within 25 years. The measure was approved unanimously and signed into law by President George H.W. Bush, a former CIA director, and set the statutory deadline, which arrives later this year.

The Cold War conspiracies documented in the coming records include:

• Transcripts of the interrogation of a Soviet defector at a CIA black site
• A report on a suspected KGB assassin in Mexico
• The CIA connections of four Watergate burglars
• The operational files of two CIA assassination planners

Over the years, opinion polls have consistently shown that more than 60 percent of Americans don’t believe the official story, that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing President Kennedy. To their disappointment, this coming trove of JFK documents isn’t likely to contain any “smoking guns.” But, as Politico noted in 2015, there will be plenty of potentially embarrassing information about the CIA - an institution Trump and his supporters have denigrated as part of the “Deep State.”

Read the rest at AlterNet

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