by Marc Caputo, NBCnews:
President Joe Biden last year postponed the release of 16,000 records until Dec. 15, but the Mary Ferrell Foundation says the delay was illegal.
The country’s largest online source of JFK assassination records is suing President Joe Biden and the National Archives to force the federal government to release all remaining documents related to the most mysterious murder of a U.S. president nearly 60 years ago.
The Mary Ferrell Foundation filed the federal lawsuit Wednesday one year after Biden issued a memo postponing the release of a final trove of 16,000 records assembled under the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, which Congress passed without opposition in response to Oliver Stone’s Oscar-nominated film “JFK.”
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The JFK records act, signed by President Bill Clinton, required that the documents be made public by Oct. 26, 2017, but President Donald Trump delayed the release and kicked the can to Biden, who critics say continued the policy of federal obfuscation that has existed since Kennedy was assassinated Nov. 22, 1963, in an open motorcade at Dealey Plaza in Dallas.
“It’s high time that the government got its act together and obeyed the spirit and the letter of the law,” said the vice president of the nonpartisan Mary Ferrell Foundation, Jefferson Morley, an expert on the assassination and the CIA.
“This is about our history and our right to know it,” said Morley, the author of the JFK Facts blog.
Morley’s sentiment is shared by fellow historians, open government advocates and even some members of the Kennedy family, who usually don’t comment on the assassination.
“It was a momentous crime, a crime against American democracy. And the American people have the right to know,” said Robert Kennedy Jr., the son and namesake of JFK’s brother. “The law requires the records be released. It’s bizarre. It’s been almost 60 years since my uncle’s death. What are they hiding?”
Most experts believe that the unreleased or heavily redacted records almost certainly don’t include irrefutable proof that shows others were complicit in the murder of Kennedy along with accused shooter Lee Harvey Oswald.
What the records would shed more light on, they say, is a seminal period in American history linked to JFK’s presidency and assassination: Cold War operations by U.S. intelligence agents, U.S.-Cuba relations and the plot to kill dictator Fidel Castro, and the war on the Mafia waged by then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who was assassinated five years after his brother.
The hidden documents, however, could also show something potentially more sinister: CIA contacts with Oswald while Kennedy was still alive, which the CIA has repeatedly covered up, according to experts like Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a former CIA agent who is critical of the agency and has lectured about JFK’s assassination at Harvard University.
“What I think happened, in a nutshell, is that Oswald was recruited into a rogue CIA plot,” Mowatt-Larssen said. “This group of three, four or five rogues decided their motive [was] to get rid of Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis because they thought it was their patriotic duty given the threat the country was under at the time and their views, which would be more hard-line or more radically anti-communist and very extreme politically.”
In a statement to NBC News, the CIA said it is adhering to the JFK records act and Biden’s memo, which called for the release of the documents by Dec. 15. The National Archives and Records Administration, the agency in charge of the JFK documents, also said it’s complying with the law and the procedures Biden outlined.
