Tucker Carlson and the MAGA Rift: Has Trump Failed on the JFK Files?

Like him or not, the president accomplished a lot with Executive Order 14176.

Recently, conservative reporter and former Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson interviewed his brother Buckley, a Republican Party communications professional, on the Tucker Carlson Network. The title of the interview — “The Great Betrayal” — referred to their disappointment and disillusionment with the second presidency of Donald J. Trump.

The exchange came during a period of palpable division within the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement over issues such as the war in Iran and the lack of transparency around late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. But it also included a reference to JFK.

Near the end of the two-hour and 17-minute conversation, the subject turned to specific failures of the Trump administration, as Buckley perceived them:

Tucker: But it was the war that finally scrambled your eggs.

Buckley: Yes. Yes, the war, Charlie [Kirk], and then of course the Epstein files.

Tucker: Oh, the Epstein files!

Buckley: The Epstein files, the JFK files, the 9/11 files — all things that he had committed to showing to the American people. … Trump had committed to doing all three of those things. He’s done none of them.

Leaving aside the Epstein or 9/11 files, the point about the JFK files simply isn’t true. Like him or not, Trump has accomplished a lot toward completing the record of JFK’s death.

Success or Failure?

When Trump signed Executive Order 14176 on Jan. 23, 2025, he decreed the “full and complete release” of all records related to the assassinations of JFK, Martin Luther King Jr., and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in the possession of federal agencies. At first, the administrative mechanism for the releases appeared slightly arcane and awkward, as JFK Facts reported at the time.

President Trump’s JFK Declassification Decree Has Potential Vulnerabilities

But the Trump administration did demonstrate seriousness about releasing the remaining files that the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) still held in redacted form in the so-called JFK Collection. As a result of the executive order, NARA released about 80,000 totally unredacted pages from the JFK Collection on March 18, 2025, and followed up with smaller releases later in the year and in January 2026.

Some in the JFK assassination research community believe that thousands of files in the JFK Collection may remain withheld. Judge John Tunheim, former chairman of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), referred to “27,000 individual rulings” in his congressional testimony on May 20, 2025. These “final determination notifications” show that NARA flouted the letter of the law for years by not releasing tens of thousands of records on the dates that the ARRB specified for full disclosure in the 1990s.

Tunheim also noted that federal agencies transferred an unknown number of such records to NARA after the ARRB wrapped up on Sept. 30, 1998. The process has been chaotic. As many researchers have correctly noted, the JFK Collection is a “mess.”

Even one record still withheld is too many, and lawyers Andrew Iler and Mark Adamczyk recently laid out the legal case meticulously in a very scholarly 3-part online article. The JFK Records Act of 1992 is unambiguous: All JFK assassination records must be released in full (tax records retained by the IRS remain exempt under the Internal Revenue Code). No reasonable truth-seeker takes issue with that.

However, while we can’t know exactly how many such records remain withheld in violation of the 1992 statute, it seems very doubtful they amount to “thousands.” The 2025 releases also rendered most of the very lamentable violations legally moot. A record that should have been released earlier but is now disclosed in full would deprive an aggrieved party of its cause of action in a legal claim for disclosure now.

The quest for a “smoking gun” of conspiracy in the remaining undisclosed records in the JFK Collection reminds us all that orders of prioritization differ within the research community. We trust that a civil tone can be maintained when differences of priority arise. There is no “plot” afoot to sideline anyone for prioritizing some things more than others.

All of this should beg the question of assassination-related files that federal agencies like the CIA and FBI never turned over to the ARRB in the first place. Trump’s executive order was supposed to extend to all executive-branch records, including those held outside the National Archives. How aware is President Trump that such records exist?

It also leaves open the question of records controlled by the Kennedy family. Those remain in private hands, but the public has a strong interest in their contents. We have little sense so far that the Kennedys as a whole are inclined to release them.

This is where Trump can be faulted. He issued an order for declassification but didn’t organize a process for enlightening the public on what remained undisclosed, whether under the control of the executive branch or not.

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, chair of the House Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, did succeed in securing the disclosure of some CIA records that were not in the JFK Collection. Notable among these is the personnel file of CIA psychological warfare officer George Joannides, released in July last year. Release of the Joannides file was a legislative-branch initiative achieved with help from an executive-branch official, CIA Director John Ratcliffe — in furtherance of the spirit of Trump’s decree.

New JFK File: A Spy Called 'Howard' Publicized Oswald, Targeted Americans, and Recruited Assassins

The Joannides file proved that the CIA had lied to government investigators and the public for decades about the extent of its knowledge of — and contacts with — accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. We still don’t know the exact extent of such knowledge and contacts, but we know it’s more than we’ve been told all these years. It thus represents a new chapter in solving the mystery of JFK’s murder.

Rep. Luna and Director Ratcliffe deserve credit for trying to implement Trump’s order. Sadly, it does look as if — like Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — President Trump has lost interest in the JFK files. We can only speculate (with disappointment) as to why.

What we can say with certainty is that although Trump’s executive order didn’t solve the case, it did solve much of the problem of the overclassification of JFK files. It also illuminated and confirmed once and for all CIA malfeasance in 1963.

That may not mean anything to Buckley Carlson, and if it doesn’t, he has some company in the JFK assassination research community. But it's not nothing.

Postscript: A Personal Note

Full Disclosure: I met Tucker Carlson once in 2000, when he treated me to a Tex-Mex meal in Alexandria, Virginia. His late father, Richard Carlson, a wonderful storyteller, was a friend of my parents. Tucker was working for the now-defunct neoconservative Weekly Standard magazine, but I nevertheless found him genial, bright, and generally agreeable.

I met his brother Buckley in 2004 in the Autonomous Republic of Ajara, a constituent region of the ex-Soviet Republic of Georgia. Though I never really got to know him, Buckley impressed me superficially as a “hale fellow well met,” to use an old idiom.

Buckley and I faced a bleak evening on a junket of Western journalists accommodated in a rundown resort hotel on Georgia’s Black Sea coast. Confronting the dim prospect of a night without libation, Buckley proceeded to raid the darkened bar, where a few forlorn and dusty bottles of room-temperature beer remained, possibly since the Soviet era.

Figuring this might end badly and dreading a “scene,” I abstained, shuffling off to my spartan room. But I do remember that Matt Labash, a Weekly Standard correspondent, egged on Buckley in the bar raid. It might make a good anecdote for a memoir one day, but my memory of the affair is hazy. I suspect Buckley Carlson’s is too.