Why declassified JFK assassination files released by Trump may anger conspiracy theorists
Topics: Conspiracy Theories, History, Politics, US News
Joe Yates
Featured Image Credit: Getty Images/Bettmann
Topics: Conspiracy Theories, History, Politics, US News
During President Donald Trump's first term, he told Americans that he was 'releasing ALL JFK files'. Eight years later, they're still questions to be answered.
Former 35th President John F. Kennedy was assassinated just over 61 years ago, on November 22, 1963, while riding in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas.
The Democrat was sat in the back of an armoured Lincoln convertible limousine, alongside his wife Jacqueline Kennedy, Texas Governor John Connally, and his wife, Nellie Connally.
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Conspiracy theorists have long believed the Soviet Union, Cuba, or even the US government could have been involved in it, and after the release of around 2,000 new documents to the public on Tuesday (March 18), we're still way off closure.
Many believe FK's assassin Lee Harvey Oswald - who sniped the 43-year-old from a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository, at around 12.30pm - was working for the Cuban authorities, while others suggested he was an operative of the Soviet Union.
Documents reveal how the CIA was following an American man who they described as a Communist living in Mexico - this filing in particular has been of interest to researchers due to Oswald's visits to both the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico City in the months prior to JFK's death.
Their release came after President Trump signed an executive order to release classified files on his assassination when he was just five days into office (January 25), and although he insisted they wouldn't be redacted... but many of the pages were, heavily, much to the public's dismay.
Some memos include the CIA describing how a KGB official - the Soviet Union's main security agency, which was pretty much the CIA's Eastern European counterpart - had scanned through dozens of files on Oswald and determined that he was not an asset for the intelligence agency.
Another claimed that the murderer had spoken with a KGB official just months before JFK's death.
But instead of these documents sending clarity to US citizens, more specifically conspiracy theorists, they really just opened up a can of worms - with more questions now being asked than those answered.
This latest volume of files to be released will more likely lead to accusations that the deep state was involved in the assassination, which has become one of the biggest events in modern history, rather than provide definitive answers to the mystery surrounding the killing of JFK.
Their release is also likely to have left conspiracy theorists angered above anything else, as on top of this, much of the papers were poorly scanned or faded, making it impossible to read, while some contained illegible handwriting.
Many also commented on how the Biden administration had released the majority of the pages two years prior.