President Donald Trump’s decision to release 2,800 classified documents offered plenty of new details about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963 by Lee Harvey Oswald, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The files, which were posted to the National Archives’ website Thursday evening, ranged from records concerning how the CIA raided the trash at the Cuban embassy in Mexico City to transcripts of interviews of a Russian defector, The Journal adds.
Documents included notes about people interviewed by FBI agents, leads that went nowhere, and handwritten reports now near illegible. One of the files also revealed that Oswald visited the Soviet embassy in Mexico City in the weeks before the assassination and met with a top diplomat, The Journal notes.
According to the released file, Oswald had spoken with Consul Valeriy Vladimirovich Kostikova, who was referred to as an “identified KGB officer” and later identified to have “worked for the KGB’s 13th Department (responsible for sabotage and assassination).”
The Journal adds that while Trump authorized the release of 2,800 documents, he said that some information will remain secret for now due to national security concerns. In a memo Trump said that he “has no choice” but to withhold the information as requested by government agencies, citing national security concerns, The Hill reports.
“I have no choice today but to accept those redactions rather than allow potentially irreversible harm to our Nation’s security,” Trump said in the memo to department and agency heads released by the White House.
“The remaining records will be released with agency-proposed redactions on a rolling basis in the coming weeks. The president has demanded unprecedented transparency from the agencies and directed them to minimize redactions without delay. The National Archives will therefore release more records, with redactions only in the rarest of circumstances, by the deadline of April 26, 2018,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement.
Politico reported last week that some of the files could contain highly sensitive information that some intelligence officials and agencies may not want released. The Kennedy assassination which happened in 1963 has long been subject of conspiracy theories, The Hill adds.
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