“But while the Archives is monitoring and building the JFK collection, it doesn’t really have the teeth to enforce the law.” The JFK Records Act is “passively in effect, with the National Archives being the shepherd of releasing information,” said Mark Zaid, national security attorney, in an interview. The board accepted that argument at the time. “They pushed us very hard, saying release of the information could bring about the downfall of the PRI government. Tunheim recounted that in the 1990s the State Department strongly objected to the release of information about CIA and FBI cooperation with the Mexican government in 1963. “The reasons we postponed information did not protect that information forever, especially in light of the public interest in full disclosure.” “My assumption was that 25 years was a sufficient length of time for the government to release everything,” said Tunheim, now chief U.S. Judge John Tunheim, former chair of the Assassination Records Review Board, said in an interview that he was surprised at how much JFK material remained secret after the statutory deadline. Trump’s memo effectively gave the CIA, FBI, and other agencies another four years of secrecy and handed the decision to his successor. On April 26, 2018, another Trump memorandum authorized a process whereby the rest of the still-redacted documents would be reviewed by October 26, 2021. That could change in 2021, depending on Congress and the White House. Martin Luther King, Jr., has followed the JFK Records Act process for the last two decades with the goal of clarifying the causes of JFK’s murder, which are still shrouded in official secrecy. The Mary Ferrell Foundation, a non-profit online archive of material related to the assassination of JFK, Robert Kennedy and Dr. Nearly 5 percent of the JFK records held by the National Archives remain redacted in some form. But thousands of pages of material remained out of public view. More than 34,000 unique documents were released, or re-released with fewer redactions, in seven batches in 20. The JFK Records Act mandated that, 25 years after the passage of the Act, all such records should be released in full, barring a determination by the president that “continued postponement is made necessary by an identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations” and “the identifiable harm is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure.” Thousands of records remained “withheld in full.” So, the ARRB released tens of thousands of JFK assassination-related records with “redactions” (blackouts) – sometimes only a name, sometimes entire pages. The law also allowed government agencies to continue withholding material deemed too sensitive to make public. The act created the Assassination Records Review Board ( ARRB), which oversaw the declassification of some four million pages of material related to the assassination of JFK and the various investigations into his murder. The release of the material is mandated by the JFK Records Act, passed by Congress in October 1992 in response to the furor over Oliver Stone’s film JFK, which depicted the assassination as the work of senior CIA and Pentagon officials. I have no choice - today - but to accept those redactions rather than allow potentially irreversible harm to our Nation’s security.” After hearing from CIA director Mike Pompeo, Trump stated that because “national security, law enforcement, and foreign affairs concerns. The legal timetable was established by an executive memo issued by President Donald Trump on October 26, 2017. They include contemporaneous reports related to the murder of the 35 th president in Dallas on November 22, 1963, files of CIA officers who knew about accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, and interviews conducted by congressional investigators in the 1970s. Most of these records were generated by the CIA and FBI. Some 15,834 assassination-related documents remain partially or wholly classified, according to the National Archives. The president must then decide by October 26 whether to accept or modify the Archivist’s recommendations. The Archivist is scheduled to make a recommendation by September 26 about the disposition of the records. With an April 26 deadline looming, federal agencies must inform the National Archives later this month about their plans to release the historic documents or continue withholding them. government’s still-secret records related to the assassination of President John F. Later this year President Joe Biden will face a decision about the disposition of the last of the U.S.
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