ASSASSINATION ARCHIVES

AND RESEARCH CENTER

AARC in The New York Times

March 19, 2025, 11:23 a.m. EST

It’s no secret that the C.I.A. has long placed agents undercover as State Department officials. Daniel Alcorn, president of the Assassination Archives and Research Center, the largest private collection of material related to the Kennedy assassination, speculated that the newly released portion of Schlesinger’s memo to Kennedy about the practice had long been redacted because it confirmed the C.I.A.’s cover arrangements. “I guess they consider that a matter of secrecy,” he said. “They really just didn’t want the embarrassment or the negative attention.”

A newly unredacted portion of a 1961 memo to President Kennedy describes how the C.I.A. had placed about 1,500 agents overseas as State Department employees. The aide who authored the memo, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., wrote that the practice, which was originally meant to be temporary and limited, was threatening the State Department’s control of foreign policy.

“In the Paris Embassy today, there are 128 CIA people,” Schlesinger wrote to Kennedy. “CIA occupies the top floor of the Paris Embassy, a fact well known locally; and on the night of the Generals’ revolt in Algeria, passers-by noted with amusement that the top floor was ablaze with lights.”

RELATED: Jefferson Morley on the latest JFK Documents

JFK Assassination Records – 2025 Documents Release

March 18, 2025 Release

In accordance with President Donald Trump’s directive of March 17, 2025, all records previously withheld for classification that are part of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection are released.

The National Archives has partnered with agencies across the federal government to comply with the President’s directive in support of Executive Order 14176.

As of March 18, 2025, the records are available to access either online at this page or in person, via hard copy or on analog media formats, at the National Archives at College Park, Maryland. As the records continue to be digitized, they will be posted to this page.

  • March 18, 2025 – 7 PM EST Release: 32,000 pages (1,123 PDF files)
  • March 18, 2025 – 10:30 PM EST Release: 31,400 pages (1,059 PDF files)
  • March 20, 2025 – 9:30 PM EST Release: 13,700 pages (161 PDF files)
  • March 26, 2025 – 3:30 PM EST Release: 53 pages (16 PDF files)
  • April 03, 2025 – 7:00 PM EST Release: 704 pages (207 PDF files)

CLICK HERE

Trump’s promise to release JFK files sets off all-night scramble by DOJ’s National Security Division

Trump announced the files’ release while visiting the Kennedy Center Monday

March 18, 2025, 9:45 AM

The Justice Department’s National Security Division has been in a scramble trying to meet President Donald Trump’s promise on Monday to release declassified information from the JFK assassination investigation today.

Trump, during a visit Monday to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, announced the government would be releasing all the files on Kennedy’s assassination on Tuesday afternoon.

Less than half an hour after that announcement, the Justice Department’s office that handles foreign surveillance requests and other intelligence-related operations began to shift resources to focus on the task, sources said.

In an email just before 5 p.m. ET Monday, a senior official within DOJ’s Office of Intelligence said that even though the FBI had already conducted “an initial declassification review” of the documents, “all” of the attorneys in the operations section now had to provide “a second set of eyes” to help with this “urgent NSD-wide project.”

Eventually, however, it was other National Security Division attorneys who ended up having to help, sources said.

Attorneys from across the division were up throughout the night, into the early morning hours, each reading through as many as hundreds of pages of documents, sources said. Only prosecutors with an impending arrest or other imminent work did not have to help, sources said.

President John F. Kennedy, shown during his news conference at the State Department.
Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

A Justice Department spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment from ABC News.

In promising the release of JFK files today, Trump said Monday that there is “a tremendous amount of paper.”

“You’ve got a lot of reading,” he said. “I don’t believe we’re going to redact anything. I said, ‘Just don’t redact. You can’t redact.'”

Trump in January signed an executive order directing the “full and complete release of records relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy” in order to end the decades-long wait for the release of the government’s secret files on Kennedy’s 1963 assassination.

 

By Mike Levine, Katherine Faulders, and Alexander Mallin

ABC News’ Hannah Demissie and Molly Nagle contributed to this report.

U.S. Justice Department orders national-security lawyers to review JFK documents

Courtesy of Joe Backes
WASHINGTON, March 18 (Reuters) – The U.S. Justice Department is ordering some of its lawyers who handle sensitive national-security matters to urgently review records from the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy that are due to be released on Tuesday, according to an email seen by Reuters.
Christopher Robinson, a National Security Division official, announced that “all” attorneys who work in the Operations Section of the Office of Intelligence are being ordered to review between 400 and 500 documents each, according to a Monday evening email seen by Reuters on Tuesday.
It is not clear whether that would interfere with the lawyers’ regular work, which includes filing court requests under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to monitor foreigners on U.S. soil.
A Justice Department spokesman said that “no FISA work was halted” as a result of the review.
Robinson imposed a deadline of noon Tuesday to complete the review, which includes records related to the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, as well as Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and “possibly others.”
Trump has ordered roughly 80,000 pages of material related to Kennedy’s assassination to be released, along with government records related to the assassinations of former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and civil-rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.
He previously signed an executive order in January, prompting the FBI to search for thousands of records.
“There is an urgent declassification review of documents related to the JFK, RFK, MLK investigations (and possibly others),” Robinson wrote to the attorneys in the Office of Intelligence, adding that the only people exempt from the assignment are those who are on approved leave.
“Everyone is being asked to review a batch of documents (between 400-500 each),” he said.
Robinson said that FBI agents have already reviewed some of those files as part of the declassification review.
Last week, some FBI agents were ordered to stop working on their usual cases so that they could review files related to the 1968 assassination of former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, a person briefed on the matter told Reuters.
The Operations Section of the Office of Intelligence is in charge of preparing and filing warrant applications with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to collect communications of foreigners on domestic soil.
Former department attorneys said the decision to require all of the attorneys from the Office of Intelligence Operations Section to handle the declassification review is highly unusual, and could undermine legitimate national security work.
“If the commitment of such resources came at the expense of processing FISA applications, that would be to the detriment of U.S. national security interests,” said David Laufman, the former chief of the Justice Department’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section.
John F. Kennedy’s murder has been attributed to a sole gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald. The Justice Department and other federal government bodies later reaffirmed that conclusion.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who now leads the Department of Health and Human Services, has alleged without evidence that the Central Intelligence Agency was involved. The CIA has repeatedly denied the claim.
He has also claimed his father was killed by multiple gunmen, a claim contradicted by official accounts.

STAFF SHAKEUP

The declassification review follows a staffing shakeup within the National Security Division.
Earlier this month, the head of the Office of Intelligence and another career official were abruptly reassigned to other jobs, three people familiar with the matter told Reuters, as part of a broader effort to purge career employees.
The leadership of the National Security Division, which would normally be staffed by up to 12 lawyers, has dwindled to about three attorneys, one of the sources said.
Trump and his allies have long complained about the use of FISA warrants after the Justice Department’s inspector general in 2019 uncovered widespread errors by the FBI in its warrant applications during its investigation into contacts between President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia.

Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch; additional reporting by Andrew Goudsward; Editing by Andy Sullivan and Nick Zieminski