The FBI’s Surprising Treasure Trove of Kennedy Assassination Files

One of the first Executive Orders by the new administration required a plan to be delivered to the White House by Friday, February 7^th.

That outlined a release of all remaining classified documents held by the US government on the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, of his brother Robert Kennedy, murdered in 1968, and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, also murdered in 1968.

Most assassination experts and researchers didn’t expect much of interest to be revealed.

Tom Samoluk, who reviewed all of the classified material held by the National Archives in the 1990s as the Deputy Director of the Assassination Records Review Board, famously said, “The records will not reveal any smoking gun.”[¹]

Then came the bombshell announced on February 12th, 2025. The FBI, in compliance with the EO, had located and were turning over an astounding 2,400 files amounting to 14,000 pages.

These documents had never been shared with any investigation, according to preliminary reports.[²]

It’s possible those preliminary reports are incorrect, and that these files may simply be duplicates of existing material. Author Gerald Posner, who clings to the lone gunman theory, believes it’s possible that these are indeed duplicates of files already in the possession of the National Archives.

He added, however, “If they are really new assassination documents, then it raises a whole bunch of questions about how they were missed for all of these years.”[³]

Assuming the preliminary reports are correct and that these files haven’t been shared with any of the former investigations, this leaves both previous investigating committee members and

even some judges perplexed and angry.

The judge who oversaw the declassification of the Kennedy assassination files in the 1990s, Judge John Tunheim, said recently that the FBI had “clearly assured” him that all relevant documents had been provided.[⁴]

One of the first reporters to break this story, Marc Caputo of Axios, reaffirmed that these files had never been shared with any previous investigation.[⁵] In his report, Caputo stated, “Administration officials determined these newly discovered records hadn't been submitted to or vetted by the Assassination Review Board or the National Archives.”

But 2,400 files and 14,000 pages strongly suggests these files contain multiple investigations, as well as statements from dozens of agents, subjects and/or witnesses.

If none of these files were ever submitted to either the 1964 Warren Commission, the 1976 House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), or the 1992 President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act,[⁶] then such a deliberate withholding of so massive an amount of first-hand data suggests one of two things:

- The FBI hid these files to protect the FBI; or

- The FBI hid these files to protect the FBI and the CIA.

But why would the FBI feel the need to protect itself? And what connection would the FBI have had with the CIA over Oswald?

While we’re focused on the FBI’s astounding announcement, we shouldn’t forget that the CIA has its own still-hidden cache of classified documents.

While they have been forthcoming with thousands of files, they still retain more than 3,000 files they deem too compromising to release to the public. Even sixty years after the events of the assassination.[⁷]

This doesn’t include the massive amounts of destroyed evidence that multiple government agencies undertook after the assassination, to cover their tracks and their connections with Oswald. These destroyed or deliberately hidden pieces of evidence include:

- A handwritten note that Oswald gave to the Dallas FBI office ten days before the assassination was ordered burned by Special Agent in Charge, Gordon Shanklin.[⁸] The presence of this note and its subsequent destruction was never reported to the Warren Commission, and was never made public until 1975, twelve years later.

- A fourteen-minute gap occurred in a phone call between FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and President Lyndon Johnson, less than twenty-four hours after the assassination.[⁹]

- When Oswald was interviewed for over twelve hours by Dallas police, supposedly no transcriber or court reporter was ever present to take notes. How could an interview of a murder suspect, especially one accused of two murders within an hour of each other, not be preserved with any form of documentation? Unless the police also had something to hide. All we have are some scribbled notes and the word of police officers who, it should be noted, are also accused of helping Jack Ruby enter the police parking garage to shoot Oswald two days later.[¹⁰]

- In January, 1995, just days before the Secret Service were set to testify before the Assassination Records Review Board, two boxes of documents were destroyed by the Service. Those files covered their handling of the president’s security in the Fall of 1963.[¹¹] The Review Board had specifically wanted to see those reports, as they deemed such internal discussions within the Service would have been both informative and revelatory.

- The day after the assassination, while Oswald was still alive and in custody, the Deputy Chief of the CIA office in New Orleans was ordered to gather up all the files they had on Oswald and deliver them immediately to CIA headquarters in Langley, VA.[¹²] The deputy chief learned afterwards that the files were, in his words, “deep sixed.” However, there is one whistleblower who is prepared to share the details he personally witnessed of a secure room at Langley with hundreds of files on Oswald and the assassination, files that have never been made public.[¹³]

This is just the tip of the iceberg of the many hundreds of recorded instances where the CIA, the FBI, the Secret Service, and the Dallas police deliberately withheld evidence from multiple investigations.

The good news is that enough files have been released over the past twenty years to shed much needed light on the connections Oswald had with both the CIA and the FBI in the runup to the assassination.

None of these files were considered as important by the Warren Commission. To this day, authors like Gerald Posner refuse to even contemplate the possibility that any type of conspiracy existed, or that anyone except Oswald fired any weapon at Dealey Plaza on that fateful day.

As we shall see in the coming articles, there is an avalanche of information already known about the CIA’s involvement in the Kennedy assassination. We can only hope the soon-to-be-released FBI files will shine even more light on the Agency’s inescapable role in the killing of an American president.

1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpNx0Jkn1WY&t=13s

2 https://www.axios.com/2025/02/10/trump-jfk-assassination-records

3 https://www.wbaltv.com/article/fbi-jfk-new-records-discovered/63768860

4 https://jfkfacts.substack.com/p/exclusive-judge-anxious-to-see-jfk

5 https://www.axios.com/2025/02/10/trump-jfk-assassination-records

6 https://sgp.fas.org/advisory/arrb98/part03.htm

7 https://apnews.com/article/jfk-fbi-trump-newly-discovered-files-0bd8ad5569f5fa3ed92b8ee9b795c9e7 8 https://www.maryferrell.org/pages/Destruction_of_the_Oswald_Note.html

9 https://jfkfacts.substack.com/p/trail-of-destruction-the-destroyed

10 https://www.quora.com/What-happened-to-the-tapes-and-transcripts-of-Lee-Harvey-Oswalds-interrogation-after-his-arrest-by-the-Dallas-Police-Department

11 https://history-matters.com/archive/jfk/arrb/report/html/arrb_fin_170.htm

12 https://jfkfacts.substack.com/p/trail-of-destruction-the-destroyed

13 https://jfkfacts.substack.com/p/exclusive-whistleblower-cites-explosive