Partial Amount Of JFK Assassination Secret Documents Released, Where Are The Rest?

The National Archives and Records Administration released a partial number of classified documents on Wednesday relating to the 1963 assassination of former President John F. Kennedy.

There were 1,491 documents released from a total of about 10,000. The rest are either partially redacted or withheld entirely. They can be read here.

The Biden administration was originally going to have them released in October, but President Joe Biden issued an extension for the release due to the pandemic and for security purposes.

Biden said in October following the extension that the decision was to “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 extension gave The National Archives until Wednesday for any documents that agencies have not proposed to be withheld. This gives the other remaining documents until Dec. 15, 2022, to be released, which Biden says is also allowing them to be reviewed for security purposes.

In 2017, Congress declared that “all Government records concerning the assassination of President John F. Kennedy ... should be eventually disclosed to enable the public to become fully informed about the history surrounding the assassination.”

There has long been speculation that the CIA, FBI and other national security agencies may have been withholding information.

But some are still criticizing the fact that Biden did not release the records in full. Larry Schnapf, a lawyer and assassination researcher, wrote in an email to reporters his intentions of suing Biden for failing to do so.

"We will be seeking a court order instructing the President to release the remaining records or to disclose the specific identifiable harm posed by each document sought to be postponed and how such alleged harm outweighs the strong public interest in the release of these records, which were supposed to have been released by October 26, 2017," Schnapf wrote. according to CNN.