Why the Declassified JFK Assassination Documents Won’t Contain a Smoking Gun, Part I

One of the first executive orders that President Trump signed promised the release of all the remaining classified documents still held in the National Archives on three important assassinations.

Those of President John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert F. Kennedy, and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

But any expectations need to be quelled, based on what we already know.

For one, this Executive Order doesn’t actually force a release of the documents. The order only requires the newly appointed Director of National Intelligence, Pam Bondi, to submit a plan to the President by last Friday, February 7th.[¹]

As of midnight Eastern Time, no announcement has been made about the submission of any plan.

That plan itself may constitute its own lengthy timeline before a release of any of the JFK assassination files still remaining in the custody of the National Archives.[²]

Larry Schnapf, an attorney who has worked for years to see the remaining assassination files, said in a recent interview that ‘If they’re going to do a substantive [page by page] review, then it’s going to be a while before the records are released.’[³]

That same Executive Order also contains a parallel request to present a similar plan within the following thirty days for the release of the remaining files on the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Both were killed in 1968.

Again, this would just be for the submission of a plan, not the release of the files themselves.

Secondly, those who have actually seen the remaining documents caution the public not to get their hopes up. ‘The records will not reveal any smoking gun,’ says Tom Samoluk, who reviewed all the classified material in the 1990s as the Deputy Director of the Assassination Records Review Board.[⁴]

Despite such caution, some social media posts are claiming that the released documents will contain explosive new revelations.

Those include such unlikely possibilities as Kennedy planning to dissolve the Federal Reserve and returning the US to the gold standard. As well as a CIA document outlining their use of Lee Harvey Oswald doubles to place him in Mexico City and New Orleans on dates when he may not have been in those cities at all.[⁵]

Samoluk says the secrecy surrounding the JFK investigation is not because there are still important new revelations about the CIA’s role in the killings. But because the documents contain outdated spy methods, still-living contacts, and some personal files and tax records.

Samoluk said:

‘Most records, the vast majority of records, the records that the Review Board did not release in the mid '90s, need to be released now. Not that the assassination can be solved. I can tell you that the Review Board, the staff, we looked at all of these records. There's no smoking gun if you will. However, they do put together the assassination chronology more completely.’[⁶]

Presidential historian Tom Whelan doesn’t think there are any more withheld files that will clear up the many inconsistencies and outright contradictions in the Warren Commission and the ensuing assassination investigations. ‘I doubt this [release] is going to definitively prove whether or not there was a conspiracy to kill the president.’[⁷]

‘Do I know what happened? I don’t,’ Samoluk added. ‘And I think the reality where everyone will be convinced that they know what happened has been lost to history.’[⁸]

There’s one significant reason why the American public will never see the truth behind the coverup of the Kennedy assassination. That reason is simply because the CIA has been known to destroy evidence that is too damning to be released to the public.

And we have hard evidence of the CIA’s leadership doing just that, over many decades.

In 1973, then-CIA director Richard Helms led a concerted effort to destroy all of the records connected with Project MKULTRA, a CIA program designed to create a Manchurian Candidate brainwashing response in test subjects.[⁹]

Helms and MKULTRA director Sidney Gottlieb destroyed thousands of files. All to cover up what they knew would be a damning revelation of the Agency intentionally violating its mandate, which is restricted to gathering overseas intelligence.[¹⁰]

In 2009, the CIA even admitted it had over 3,000 separate documents just on destroyed interrogation tapes of US citizens. That was another violation of its charter, documents that were being withheld from the public.[¹¹]

CIA Director George H.W. Bush in 1976 requested permission to destroy even more files.[¹²]

There was strong pushback from the Senate oversight committee, who complained that such deletions might include operations to assassinate foreign leaders. Bush’s dubious explanation for the need to delete such files was because the CIA didn’t have enough room to store such files. The oversight committee found that excuse laughable.

It’s not just the CIA that has destroyed such damning evidence.

During the Watergate crisis, Richard Nixon was complaining in the Oval Office about the lack of support he was getting from Congressional Republicans. Forgetting that the White House had a system to record all conversations, whether live or by phone, he began a lengthy rant about ‘that Bay of Pigs thing,’ that lasted eighteen and a half minutes.[¹³]

The tape of that conversation was found to have been erased. In fact, electronics experts who analyzed the tape found no less than five separate starting-and-stopping efforts to erase whatever damning evidence was contained in Nixon’s diatribe.[¹⁴]

Those same experts concluded there may have been as many as nine separate erasing efforts done. Someone certainly didn’t want what Nixon said to ever see the light of day.

The ‘Bay of Pigs thing’ that Nixon referred to was, according to many Kennedy assassination investigators, a reference to a group of Cuban snipers who never made it to the Bay of Pigs. They were used, according to some theories, by the CIA to assassinate Kennedy.[¹⁵]

H.R. Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff, theorized in his own book that ‘It seems that in all those references to the Bay of Pigs, he was actually referring to the Kennedy assassination.’[¹⁶]

The only possible source that may still hold evidence of the CIA’s involvement in the Kennedy assassination is the infamous 690–plus-page compilation of CIA secrets they themselves compiled for Director James R. Schlesinger in 1973.[¹⁷]

While nearly all of the illegal activities collated in that massive accounting have been revealed to the public, there’s still one outstanding. That’s ‘Family Jewel #1,’ whose four-line intro and its supporting five pages of documentation, labeled pages 007 through 011, have been completely redacted since being released to the public by Director Michael V. Hayden in 2007.[¹⁸]

Every other crime worth noting is covered in those files, from assassinations of world leaders and the overthrow of democratically-elected governments, to poisoning an entire French town with LSD poured into their water supply.

But the one operation that those 690-plus pages don’t include is even the briefest of mention of the Agency’s involvement in the Kennedy assassination.[¹⁹] And we know the CIA had been monitoring Lee Harvey Oswald as early as his attempted defection to Russia in 1959.[²⁰]

What evidence could be so damning that the CIA could never admit it?

What connections did the CIA and the FBI have with Oswald and the Kennedy assassination that still need to be covered up to this day? And are there verifiable links to such evidence that would allow us to put together a more complete understanding of how the assassination unfolded?

Thankfully, decades of serious research has revealed a much more complete picture than any files still held by the National Archives, whether they’re released or not. We’ll lay out that clearer picture in our next newsletter.

¹ https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/jfk-assassination-files-step-closer-public-release/story?id=118568831

² https://thedispatch.com/article/assessing-claims-about-the-declassified-jfk-files/

³ https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/jfk-assassination-experts-hopeful-skeptical-timing-secret-files/story⁴ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpNx0Jkn1WY&t=13s

⁵ https://tinyurl.com/242292u6

⁶ https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/jfk-assassination-report-release-tom-samoluk/ ⁷ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpNx0Jkn1WY&t=70s

⁸ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpNx0Jkn1WY&t=90s

⁹ https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/dnsa-intelligence/2024-12-23/cia-behavior-control-experiments -focus-new-scholarly

¹⁰ https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/sites/default/files/2025-01/2024-12-26_daylycaller.com-documents_ reveal_just_how_crazy_the_cias_mkultra_mind-control_program_really_was.pdf

¹¹ https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/cia-says-it-has-3000-documents-related-destroyed-interrogation -tapes

¹² https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP78M02660R000300080022-4.pdf

¹³ https://www.quora.com/H-R-Haldeman-wrote-that-whenever-Nixon-said-the-Bay-of-Pigs-on-the -Watergate-tapes-it-was-a-code-word-for-the-JFK-assassination-Was-he-right

¹⁴ https://museumofportablesound.com/watergate/

¹⁵ https://www.amazon.co.uk/Watergate-hidden-history-Nixon-Mafia/dp/192224743X ¹⁶ https://www.thehistoryreader.com/military-history/nixons-bay-pigs-secrets/

¹⁷ https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB222/index.htm

¹⁸ https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB222/family_jewels_pt1_ocr.pdf

¹⁹ https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/wheres-cias-missing-jewel/

²⁰ https://digitalcommons.law.uga.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1239&context=fac_pm#:~ :text=In%201957%E2%80%9358%2C%20Oswald%20had,visit%20Cuba%2C%20or%20both).