AND RESEARCH CENTER
Courtesy of Rex Bradford and the Mary Ferrell Foundation, with thanks to David Boylan for bringing to our attention:
Avenida Juárez and Mexico City from the heights in 1963. CIA Mexicana Aerofoto S.A.
NARA Record Number: 104-10414-10124 (248 pages)
I. INTRODUCTION
Plaintiffs the Mary Ferrell Foundation, Inc. (“MFF”), Josiah Thompson, and Gary Aguilar bring this action for declaratory relief, injunctive relief, and a writ of mandamus against Defendants President Joseph R. Biden and the National Archives and Records Administration (“NARA”). Plaintiffs argue that Defendants failed to fulfill their ministerial duties as required by the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 (“JFK Act”). In their Third Amended Complaint (“TAC”), Plaintiffs aver three claims against NARA: (1) NARA’s actions are arbitrary, capricious, and contrary to the JFK Act in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act (“APA”); (2) an APA/mandamus claim seeking to compel NARA to take certain actions; and (3) declaratory judgment that NARA’s actions violate the Federal Records Act (“FRA”). Plaintiffs have also filed several motions for preliminary injunctions or mandamus: the first, to set aside two of President Biden’s postponement memoranda and for NARA to conduct a re-review of the remaining redacted assassination records under Section 3(10) of the JFK Act and Plaintiffs’ other preferred standards; the second, to order NARA to collect all assassination records Case 3:22-cv-06176-RS Document 107 Filed 01/18/24 Page 1 of 11
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ORDER ON MOTION TO DISMISS TAC, MOTIONS FOR PRELIMINARY INJUNCTIONS
CASE NO. 22-cv-06176-RS
United States District Court
Northern District of California
under Section 12(b); and third, to order NARA publicly to disclose legislative records pursuant to the JFK Act. Defendants filed a motion to dismiss the TAC.1 For the reasons discussed below, Defendants’ motion to dismiss is granted in part and denied in part, and Plaintiffs’ motions for preliminary injunction are denied.
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V. CONCLUSION
For the reasons discussed above, Defendants’ motion to dismiss is granted as to Claim 1. Defendants’ motion is also granted as to Claim 2, except to the portions of Claim 2 concerning the legislative records and NARA’s maintenance of the identification aids. Defendants’ motion to dismiss is denied as to Claim 3, except as to the portions regarding the “missing” records and NARA’s duty to complete outstanding record searches. Defendant President Biden, who is named as a defendant and in the caption of the TAC, is also dismissed as Plaintiffs have failed to aver any claims against him and the July 14, 2023 Order already dismissed him without leave to amend. Plaintiffs have been afforded multiple opportunities to amend and, except for the surviving claims, have failed to aver claims with cognizable legal theories, so further leave to amend their complaint is not warranted. Plaintiffs’ various motions for injunctive relief are also denied.
IT IS SO ORDERED.
Dated: January 18, 2024
______________________________________
RICHARD SEEBORG
Chief United States District Judge
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He questioned the findings of the Warren Commission, called Edward Snowden a prized Russian asset and exposed the diamond industry’s economic impact.
Edward Jay Epstein in 1966, the year he turned his master’s thesis into a best-selling book on the Kennedy assassination.Credit…Marc Green/Viking Press
Edward Jay Epstein, an iconoclastic author whose deeply researched books challenged conventional wisdom about controversies ranging from whether John F. Kennedy was killed by a lone assassin to whether the whistle-blower Edward Snowden was really a Russian spy, has died in Manhattan. He was 88.
The cause was complications of Covid, his nephew Richard Nessel said. He said Mr. Epstein was found dead in his apartment on Tuesday.
A professional skeptic, Mr. Epstein wrote more than two dozen nonfiction books, many involving allegations of government conspiracies and corporate dereliction. Some raised more questions than they answered.
In an improbable start to a prolific career, he debuted as an author early in 1966 when he transformed his master’s thesis at Cornell University into a book, “Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth.” The New York Times called it “the first book to throw open to serious question, in the minds of serious people,” the conclusions reached by the presidential panel appointed to investigate President Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.
That very day in 1963, Mr. Epstein had borrowed his stepfather’s car and driven from New York City to the Cornell campus in upstate Ithaca, N.Y., to try to wangle his way back into school after having flunked out seven years earlier.
“The entire campus seemed eerily deserted,” he recalled in his memoir, “Assume Nothing: Encounters With Assassins, Spies, Presidents, and Would-Be Masters of the Universe” (2023), until he encountered a lone student, who informed him of Kennedy’s death.
Thanks to a mentor, the political scientist Andrew Hacker, whose class was one that Mr. Epstein had aced, he was readmitted and encouraged to write his thesis on the assassination. In doing so he gained access to every member of the seven-man Warren Commission except its leader, Chief Justice Earl Warren.
His book raised doubts about the commission’s finding that Kennedy was killed by a lone assassin, basing them largely on what Mr. Epstein considered serious deficiencies in the panel’s investigation. “Inquest” was published a few months before “Rush to Judgment” by Mark Lane, another in a tsunami of books suggesting that the commission had been hampered by time constraints, by limited resources and access, and by Justice Warren’s demand for unanimity to make its conclusions more credible.