Get out your evidence boards and string, conspiracy fans.
The Biden administration declassified nearly 1,500 documents related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Perhaps the biggest revelation is that a few weeks before he shot JFK in November 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald spoke with a KGB officer at the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City.
A CIA report dismissed Oswald’s visit to the Soviet Embassy as a request for a passport or visa issue.
The document dump comes two months after President Biden delayed a scheduled release of JFK material in order “protect against identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or the conduct of foreign relations that is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in the immediate disclosure.”
The Wednesday release will be followed by a comprehensive security review of the documents that remain classified, around 10,000, but there is no timeline for that review to be completed.
Of the documents released Wednesday, a majority relate to Lee Harvey Oswald.
Both President Biden and former President Donald Trump delayed releases of JFK documents at the behest of the FBI, the CIA and other national security agencies. The 1992 John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act mandated that all records related to the assassination be made public by Oct. 2017, but that has yet to occur.
A majority of the documents that have been released since that deadline passed have contained some redactions.
Ahead of Wednesday’s release, the National Archives estimated over 90% of the government’s files on the assassination had already been declassified.
