Trump Says He Will Declassify JFK Assassination Files

By Whitney Kimball, Jezebel

21 October 17

ith the regularity of a poopy rhinoceros, he has dumped another Saturday morning surprise on Twitter. And like clockwork, every Saturday morning we ask ourselves do we really have to feed him? and the answer is yes, god damn it, fine, but this is the last time.

This morning, Donald Trump tweeted around 9AM EST to tell us:

1) That he will declassify the JFK FILES [emphasis his]

2) That he is still president

Yesterday Politico reported that he would almost certainly block the release the JFK files containing documents related to JFK’s assassination. Politico wrote:

The officials held out a slim possibility that the always-unpredictable Trump could decide at the last minute to release all the remaining JFK files held at the Archives—tens, if not hundreds of thousands, of pages of long-secret documents—but said it was highly unlikely, especially because of concern that documents from the 1990s might expose relatively recent American intelligence and law-enforcement operations.

But it’s Saturday morning, which is free time with the phone, so all bets are off!

The release comes up now because this upcoming Thursday, October 26th, marks the 25-year deadline set by Congress to declassify the files. Administration spokesperson Lindsay Walters has told Politico Magazine that the files, especially those created in the nineties (and generated endless conspiracies), would need close review to make sure they pose no “identifiable harm” to national security. An anonymous congressional official specified that those threats could entail “CIA tradecraft” and jeopardize the safety of agency informants who are still alive. Politico also noted in 2015 that a former CIA officer had linked the assassination with “rogue CIA officers,” which could embarrass the CIA.

Some speculate that Lee Harvey Oswald, who lived in Belarus for nearly three years and moved to Dallas shortly before the assassination, was tied to the Soviet government. A Soviet defector who claimed to have handled Oswald’s KGB file denied this, the Washington Post reported after a document release earlier this year.

So, was it former Vice President Lyndon Johnson, as Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone wrote in his book? Was Ted Cruz’s dad involved, as Trump suggested based on a National Enquirer cover? Or was it aliens, which would be a welcome distraction?