CIA Officer: Agency Defies Trump's Order, Withholds 40 Boxes of JFK and MKULTRA Files
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna demands material be turned over after explosive Senate hearing
Active duty CIA officer James Erdman III testified in front of the Senate Oversight Committee on Wednesday about Agency obfuscation of findings around the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In his prepared remarks, he made an explosive detour into the JFK case.
He stated that the CIA took back control of 40 boxes of documents that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) was reviewing for declassification under President Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14176. That January 2025 decree ordered the release of records concerning the JFK, MLK and RFK assassinations.
Shortly after his testimony, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, the chair of House Oversight Committee’s Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, reacted bluntly with an X post addressed directly to the CIA:
“Return the documents immediately to” ODNI, she wrote. “JFK was declassified under an EO. MK ULTRA WAS REQUESTED BY CONGRESS.”
Congresswoman Luna revealed on X that she had sent a preservation notice on the stationery of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform to CIA Director John Ratcliffe.
CIA spokesperson Liz Lyons said in a statement:
“The Committee acted in bad faith by subpoenaing an Agency officer for testimony today without notifying CIA, despite having already obtained closed-door testimony from the individual previously. The witness testifying today is not appearing as a whistleblower in pursuit of the truth, but instead in response to the subpoena issued by Chairman (Rand) Paul.
This proceeding amounts to nothing more than dishonest political theater masquerading as a congressional hearing. As the CIA has already assessed, COVID-19 most likely originated from a lab leak, and efforts to undermine that conclusion are disingenuous.”
The remark about withheld JFK documents came roughly 20 minutes into a 90-minute hearing focused on disclosure of the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. Erdman had served in a joint duty assignment within DNI in a unit called the Director’s Initiatives Group (DIG) from March 2025 until April 2026, at which time he returned to the CIA.
“The legislative and executive branches will continue to be misinformed if this type of behavior is not addressed,” Erdman said immediately after the comments about the JFK and MKULTRA boxes, but presumably also referring to the primary subject of the hearing, information regarding COVID-19.
Nearly 2,700 files have been released in full under Trump’s executive order. As recently as last month, Rex Bradford of the Mary Ferrell Foundation — the nonprofit whose vast digital archive contains nearly 2 million pages of documents, government reports, books, essays, multimedia, and innovative research tools focused on the assassinations of the 1960s — said he believed that the era of mass declassification was largely over.
Wednesday’s testimony could indicate that there is more to come, while also encouraging speculation as to why so much material was withheld in defiance of the executive order.
MKULTRA documents were understood to have been destroyed in 1973 under the orders of outgoing Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms. The possible existence of never-before-seen documents related to the Agency’s mind control experiments dating back to the 1950s could put the CIA’s bad behavior back on the Congressional agenda.
“The CIA famously said that all [MKULTRA] documents had been released and others were destroyed, so these are allegedly those documents that apparently never existed,” Congresswoman Luna told NewsNation’s Katie Pavlich.
At the end of his allotted five minutes during the hearing, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) called for a new Church Committee, referring to the mid-’70s Senate committee that explored possible misdeeds by U.S. intelligence agencies.
In his response contextualizing the challenge of forming a new congressional investigative body, Chairman Paul (R-Ky.) revealed that for the last two years the CIA has stonewalled his request to access the complete and unredacted final Church Committee report, now 50 years old.
This latest controversy puts Director Ratcliffe in a difficult political position. Erdman did not accuse the Agency of withholding the documents on Ratcliffe’s orders, meaning Ratcliffe may have been unaware of what career CIA officials were doing, thus raising the question of both his and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s control over the sprawling spy agency.
"Is there a CIA inside the CIA?" Three Days of the Condor
WTF?!?!? it is astonishing that John Ratcliffe is in on this! What is it that corrupts people so thoroughly when they get into the position of Director of CIA? This is utterly outrageous.
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