U.S. to Release More Records Related to Kennedy Assassination

(Bloomberg) -- The Biden administration said it will release more records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in December. 

Some of the information regarding Kennedy’s death on Nov. 22, 1963, remained off limits to “protect against an identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or the conduct of foreign relations that is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure,” the White House said on Friday in a memorandum signed by President Joe Biden.

Although those considerations have become less and less urgent with the passage of the decades, and most of the records have been made available by the National Archives and Records Administration, several government agencies and departments must determine if any of the remaining undisclosed materials should continue to be kept from public view. 

Biden added in the memo that the Archivist of the U.S. had reported that the pandemic had slowed the process.

Some of the records will be released from Dec. 15, and most, if not all, of the rest by the end of 2022, according to the memo, 59 years after the assassination in Dallas. 

“Any information that an agency proposes for continued postponement beyond Dec. 15, 2022, shall be limited to the absolute minimum under the statutory standard,” Biden said.

Under the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, the National Archives took charge of “more than five million pages of assassination-related records, photographs, motion pictures, sound recordings and artifacts (approximately 2,000 cubic feet of records),” according to the Archives website. 

Congress intended that, under the act, all of the records would eventually be disclosed. 

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