Trump Pledges (Again) to Release All JFK Files
Republican candidate says he also will release 9/11 files. As for Jeffrey Epstein information, not so fast.
Donald Trump, former president and current Republican candidate to reclaim that office, said last week that if reelected he would release any remaining JFK assassination files still being withheld from the public.
Trump made the pledge on the “Fox & Friends Weekend” program (begins at 34:52) in response to a question from Fox’s Rachel Campos-Duffy about how to restore the American people’s trust in government institutions.
“Americans have lost a lot of trust in institutions. … How do we rebuild that trust in institutions? The CIA, the FBI … some people think that one way to build trust is to declassify things. … So if you were president … would you declassify the 9/11 files?
TRUMP: Yeah.
FOX: Would you declassify JFK files?
TRUMP: Yeah … I did a lot of it.
But when asked about files related to Jeffrey Epstein, the erstwhile financial consultant and convicted pedophile, Trump hedged.
FOX: Would you declassify the [Jeffrey] Epstein files?
TRUMP: … Yes I would, I think that less so because, you know … you don’t want to affect people’s lives if it’s phony stuff in there, because there’s a lot of phony stuff with that whole world.
Epstein was found dead in his federal prison cell in August 2019, supposedly a suicide.
Trump’s secretary of labor, Alex Acosta, happened to be the federal prosecutor who oversaw Epstein’s sweetheart deal in Florida in 2007. Acosta later said that he was told to go easy on Epstein as he was involved in “intelligence.”)
The Washington Post, in commenting on the Fox interview, made note that Trump and Epstein were hardly strangers to each other.
Why Trump Withheld
Trump was president in October 2017 when the statutorily mandated deadline arrived for the government to release all of its JFK files.
Just five days before the Oct. 26, 2017, release deadline then President Trump tweeted that “I will be allowing, as president, the long blocked and classified JFK FILES to be opened.”
And, while Trump did release many files on that October date, he fell far short from releasing them all. In explaining why he held many back, Trump alluded to “potentially irreversible harm" to national security. Most of the still-protected documents were withheld at the request of the CIA and FBI.
Former Fox commentator Judge Andrew Napolitano, in speaking with Columbia professor Jeffrey Sachs, said that Trump once told him in a phone call: “If they showed you what they showed me, you wouldn’t have released it either.” In wondering who the “they” were to whom Trump was referring, Napolitano speculated that it was “probably someone in the intelligence community.”
Indeed, it was Mike Pompeo, Trump’s CIA director in 2017, who prevailed upon the president to withhold certain documents.
Tucker Carlson, another former Fox host, in a discussion with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., JFK’s nephew and current independent candidate for president, asserted not only that it was Pompeo who convinced Trump to hold back files, but that a Pompeo confederate later threatened Carlson about revealing any information about what the JFK files held.
Files in Flux
According to the National Archives, 53,604 JFK documents were released during the Trump administration, and an additional 17,357 under the Biden administration. Some 3,648 JFK documents still have redactions, according to the Archives.
On June 30, 2023, President Biden announced the cessation, at least for an indeterminate time, of any further release of JFK documents until such time as the CIA and NSA approve. In so doing, Biden said his administration had fulfilled “the promise of transparency to the American people.”
Can we all agree to follow-up any statements put out like that with: "oh, really? Why didn't he do it in his first four YEARS?" - ?
For all of you KGB*-brainwashed JFKA conspiracy theorist suckers out there:
A sharpshooting, self-described Marxist by the name of Lee Harvey Oswald -- whom a KGB* mole by the name of Bruce Solie had sent to Moscow as an ostensible "dangle" in a planned-to-fail hunt for "Popov's Mole" in the wrong part of the CIA -- killed JFK all by himself.
*Today's SVR and FSB