Trump and the JFK Files:

The Meaning of his Executive Order

On January 23^rd, President Donald Trump came forward and finally made good on a promise he made many years ago, back in 2017. At that time he said he was looking forward to declassifying the last of the classified John F. Kennedy assassination documents. And, in fact, by law that is what he should have done. Because the originating legislation, the John F. Kennedy Records Collection Act, stated that all records that had been deferred should be declassified by October 2017. The only person who could stop it was the president.

Therefore, everyone expected this to happen and the media even picked up on the story. But Trump was visited by the CIA and FBI on that day. It was Mike Pompeo of the former that carried the water and put out the fire in Trump. Trump now gave the agencies a six month window to do what he should have done on that day. When that extension expired, incredibly, he then gave them another three years to do the job.

The far window of that 3 year time line leaked over into the Joe Biden presidency. As Andrew Iler has proven, Biden was even worse than Trump on this issue. Not only did he release less documents, he actually denuded the JFK Act. He more or less restored the process to something like the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) hearings. (See the Andrew Iler/Mark Adamcyk story of July 21, 2023 at Kennedys and King). Yet, the whole point of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) was that it switched the FOIA burden of proof. Now the agency had to show why a document should not be declassified. With the document in the open, right in front of all parties.

That new arrangement was effective. And if the Board had a bit more time, and funding, they could have completed their function in another year. That was not to be. They were active from 1994-98. And so, when they disbanded, there were plentiful documents not yet declassified, or considered irrelevant. (Some of the documents in the latter category were not at all irrelevant.)

Before we get to a critique of what later happened, let us fill in two elements. That is: how did the ARRB originate, and what did they achieve? The Board was created because of the national furor generated by Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK. At the end of that picture Stone attached a crawler which said that the files of the last investigation of the Kennedy case—the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA)-- were closed until the year 2029. This shocked many people: what was so secret that we could not learn about it for 38 years?

Thousands of people faxed, phoned, telegrammed and wrote letters to congress. This created the Review Board, which was passed into law by both houses of congress. Senator Joe Biden voted for it. President George H. W. Bush dallied about creating it. Bill Clinton actually appointed the five person Board. They got to work in the fall of 1994.

As I noted above, the Board was largely effective in its four years of operation. They released some important documents. To name just a few:

1.) Clay Shaw had a covert security clearance from the CIA, which meant he was lying about his association with that agency. (Bill Davy, Let Justice be Done, p. 195)

2.) Two INS agents saw David Ferrie going into 544 Camp Street and Lee Oswald was there. (See Bill Davy’s speech at VMI on September 2, 2017 at Kennedys and King).

3.) According to John Newman, and a fact that will be revealed in his next volume, the Joint Chiefs knew that the Russians had installed atomic missiles in Cuba before Kennedy knew about it.

4.) Sergio Arcacha Smith and Emilio Santana were the two Cuban exiles in the car with Rose Cheramie when they left her on a highway near Eunice, Louisiana. Since she predicted the JFK assassination in advance, this is some remarkable information. (Davy, p. 54)

5.) Files released and recovered by Malcolm Blunt show that HSCA investigator Betsy Wolf discovered that the CIA was using Oswald as some kind of asset, before he landed in Moscow. His file at the Agency was not normally routed, In fact the routing was so unusual Wolf started an investigation into how and why it happened. (See Jim DiEugenio’s review of The Devil is in the Details, at Kennedys and King, March 20, 2021)

I could go on and on, but these are just a few of the jewels that escaped as a result of the Review Board’s actions. You won’t see very much of it in the MSM, but we all know the way that game is played.

Its difficult to discern what is in the final files. That is because, in one of the blatant failures of NARA, the metadata describing them is extremely sketchy. But according to Paul Bleau and Andrew Iler, many of them have to do with Oswald and Mexico City. Which is interesting in and of itself, since there is a lively debate about whether or not Oswald actually was in Mexico City. This was partly fueled by the release of the Lopez Report, the HSCA’s 350 page report on Oswald’s alleged activities in Mexico City. The authors of that report—Dan Hardway and Ed Lopez—raise the strongest skepticism about whether or not Oswald really was there and, if so, did he do the things the Warren Report said he did. We would not have had that crucial report without the ARRB.

And, if not for the ARRB, we would not have the materials that literally blew open Kennedy’s autopsy. What the documents did in that regard was two key things. First, they declassified the files of the HSCA on the autopsy evidence. Second, Review Board employees Jeremy Gunn and Doug Horne conducted their own inquiry into this controversial aspect of the evidence. Briefly, by doing the former, they caught the HSCA report in a lie. In Volume 7, page 37 of their series, they wrote that those at the autopsy disagreed with the doctors at Parkland Hospital on the location and nature of JFK’s wounds. When the files of the HSCA were declassified, it was shown this was false. And Gary Aguilar compiled a list showing how false it was. Both sets of witnesses, amounting to 42 people, saw a baseball sized, avulsive wound in the rear of Kennedy’s skull. (See Murder in Dealey Plaza, p 199)

As for the Gunn/Horne inquiry, perhaps the most startling discovery they made was that, under oath, official autopsy photographer John Stringer was not prepared to say he took the photos of Kennedy’s brain that are in the National Archives. He based this largely on two facts. First he did not use the brand of film depicted in these pictures. And he did not use the press pack technique these pictures employed.. (For the devastating questioning of Stringer by Gunn, see Doug Horne’s book Inside the ARRB, pp. 808-10)

So the idea conveyed by some that there was nothing in these files, or there were not new and compelling discoveries made from them, this is utter malarkey. Just the above two revelations would be powerful courtroom evidence used to impeach the prosecution’s case. Whenever the defense can show that the prosecution used fraud in their presentation, that is not just grounds for impeachment, but they can move for a mistrial.

So why did Trump hesitate back in 2017? This was largely based on a document prepared by the Justice Department called the Gannon Memorandum, named after attorney Curtis Gannon. But even if we accept the premises of that memo, what both Trump and Biden did after was illegal. Because under the JFK Act, whenever an item was deferred, the president had to identify that document with specificity and also explain why that document was going to remain classified. Neither Trump nor Biden did this.

Secondly, the JFK Act required that there should be a periodic review of the declassification process. There is no evidence that this review was made in any manner by either congress or the National Archives. This stricture was there to make sure that any documents being deferred with a time stamp would be declassified according to that stamp. This is one of the most egregious betrayals of the JFK Act. There was no continuing, formal, systematic review. About three months before the October 2017 termination date, the Archives announced their imminent release, giving the agencies more than enough time to raise objections. And, to my knowledge, that was it.

What makes this all the worse is a recent discovery made by attorney Andrew Iler with researcher Paul Bleau at the National Archives. According to Iler, the Gannon Memorandum states that there were not final determinations made on the rest of the classified documents. A final determination means that the Board said that a document should be released by the Board’s 2017 termination debate no matter what. But Iler and Bleau found out that such was not the case. They found literally hundreds of documents which had final determinations marked on them. Iler then contacted both former Board chairman John Tunheim and former legal counsel Jeremy Gunn. They both said that every document had a final determination.

If such ends up being the case then this means that congress, the National Archives and the Justice Department completely collapsed in the performance of their duties in regards to the JFK Act. And they all gave both presidents—Trump and Biden--utterly wrong advice. One big reason being the point above: there was no periodic review. If there had been, it is hard to believe that these notifications would not have been discovered. What this means is really rather startling.

Because if Iler and Bleau are correct, everything done since October of 2017 has been an illegal dodge of the law. And it is largely based on the grounds of the Gannon Memorandum. Since there were final determinations by the Board, everything should have been declassified at that time—no ifs, ands, or buts. Congress should have noted this and taken control of the situation from the president since the JFK Act was passed by them. On the contrary, there was not a peep from the Hill at that time. Yet this would have eliminated all of this witless sturm and drang that has now gone on for seven years, thus showing how democracy does not work. And how the CIA and FBI control Washington. In other words, the Deep State Trump assails, the swamp he criticizes, made him a victim. Thanks to Mike Pompeo.

Oliver Stone issued a press release about a day after Trump signed his executive order. It was widely circulated in the media. He congratulated Trump on doing what he did. But he reminded the public that this should have been done back in 2017. He cautioned not to expect any “smoking guns” in the releases. He then added something wise. He wrote that three congressmen—Steve Cohen, David Schweikert, and Tim Burchett—had been urging this kind of action on the JFK files for a long time. (Iler has been in communication with Burchett about his discoveries) They have suggested an oversight board be constructed, something resembling the Review Board to make sure to verify the release of all the withheld records in completely unredacted form.

But perhaps more importantly they have talked about a distinct possibility that will arise from their release. That is this: within these released files there very well might be a pregnant lead to another document that was not named in the previous list by the Review Board. This is why an oversight board is needed with the power to release those documents that were not named before. Finally, one last warning: There were documents that the CIA misrepresented to the Board. Like the files on CIA officer George Joannides which, according to chairman John Tunheim, the CIA referred to as being purely personnel files, and as Tunheim told Oliver Stone the Board believed this. The Jim Lesar/Jeff Morley lawsuit, to say the least, made that answer rather dubious. There should not be anything on Joannides left unopened.

There is at least one caveat about the Trump executive order. Along with signing literally dozens of orders in his first three days, he also rescinded many orders signed by Biden. But Trump did not rescind Biden’s order on his so called Transparency Plan, mentioned above. Question: how can the spirit of his executive order exist with those defining parameters intact? Is Trump aware of this problem?