JFK files have been released. Here’s what you need to know

In this Feb. 27, 1959 file photo, Sen. John F. Kennedy, D-Mass., is shown in his office in Washington. (AP Photo, File)

U.S. President Donald Trump released material related to the 1963 assassination of former President John F. Kennedy on Tuesday, seeking to honour his campaign promise to provide more transparency about the shock event in Texas.

An initial tranche of electronic copies of papers flooded into the National Archives website with a total of more than 80,000 expected to be published after Justice Department lawyers spent hours scouring them.

The digital documents included PDFs of memos, including one with the heading “secret” that was a typed account with handwritten notes of a 1964 interview by a Warren Commission researcher who questioned Lee Wigren, a CIA employee, about inconsistencies in material provided to the commission by the State Department and the CIA about marriages between Soviet women and American men.

The documents also included references to various conspiracy theories suggesting that Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald left the Soviet Union in 1962 intent on assassinating the popular young president.

Other documents played down Oswald’s Soviet connection. One dated November 1991 cited a report from an American professor named E.B. Smith who reported he had talked in Moscow about Oswald with KGB official “Slava” Nikonov, who said he had reviewed five thick files about the assassin to determine if he had been a KGB agent.

“Nikonov is now confident that Oswald was at no time an agent controlled by the KGB,” Smith reported.

Department of Defense documents from 1963 covered the Cold War of the early 1960s and the U.S. involvement in Latin America, trying to thwart Cuban leader Fidel Castro’s support of communist forces in other countries.

The documents suggest that Castro would not go so far as to provoke a war with the United States or escalate to the point “that would seriously and immediately endanger the Castro regime.”

“It appears more likely that Castro might intensify his support of subversive forces in Latin America,” the document reads.

One document released from January 1962 reveals details of a Top Secret project called “Operation Mongoose,” or simply “the Cuban Project,” which was a CIA-led campaign of covert operations and sabotage against Cuba, authorized by Kennedy in 1961, aimed at removing the Castro regime.

Trump signed an order shortly after taking office in January related to the release, prompting the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation to find thousands of new documents related to the Kennedy assassination in Dallas.

In the scramble to comply with Trump’s order, the U.S. Justice Department ordered some of its lawyers who handle sensitive national-security matters to urgently review records from the assassination, according to a Monday evening email seen by Reuters.

“President Trump is ushering in a new era of maximum transparency,” Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said in a post on X.

Kennedy’s murder has been attributed to a sole gunman, Oswald. The Justice Department and other federal government bodies reaffirmed that conclusion in the intervening decades. But polls show many Americans believe his death was a result of a conspiracy.

Experts doubted the new trove of information will change the underlying facts of the case, that Lee Harvey Oswald opened fire at Kennedy from a window at a school book deposit warehouse as the presidential motorcade passed by Dealey Plaza in Dallas.

“People expecting big things are almost certain to be disappointed,” said Larry Sabato, the director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, who authored a book about the assassination.

He said some of the pages could simply be the release of previously published material that had a few words redacted.

Trump has also promised to release documents on the assassinations of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert Kennedy, both of whom were killed in 1968.

Trump has allowed more time to come up with a plan for those releases.

Trump’s secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the son of Robert Kennedy and nephew of John F. Kennedy, has said he believes the Central Intelligence Agency was involved in his uncle’s death, an allegation the agency has described as baseless.

Kennedy Jr. has also said he believes his father was killed by multiple gunmen, an assertion that contradicts official accounts.

One revelation the documents could contain is that the CIA was more aware of Oswald than it has previously disclosed. Questions have remained about what the CIA knew about Oswald’s visits to Mexico City six weeks before the assassination. During that trip, Oswald visited the Soviet embassy.

“People have been waiting for decades for this,” Trump said. “It’s going to be very interesting.”

Reporting by Steve Holland and Rich McKay; Editing by Donna Bryson and Aurora Ellis.