Donald Trump said he agrees with the narrative of Lee Harvey Oswald killing JFK – but also wonders whether he was helped. Trump went into his thoughts about the 1963 tragedy during an interview with Clay Travis, the founder of Fox-affiliated Outkick sports site, while on Air Force One on Saturday.
While conspiracy theories abound over the assassination, the Justice Department maintains that 24-year-old Oswald was a lone gunman, shooting the president dead from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository on November 22, 1963. When asked whether he thought Oswald acted alone, Trump said: “I do. And I’ve always felt that, but of course, was he helped?”
Oswald himself said there were other people involved, telling cops he was a “patsy” before he was killed two days later. The conspiracies about who killed Kennedy include mafia or CIA involvement, while some believe Fidel Castro or the Soviet Union was responsible.
It comes after history buffs dove into thousands of pages of government records released online last week, hoping for new nuggets about the assassination. They instead found revelations about US espionage in the massive document dump, which also exposed some previously redacted personal information.
The US National Archives and Records Administration posted more than 63,000 pages of records on its website, following an executive order from Trump. Many of the documents had been released previously but with redactions that hid the names of CIA sources or details about its spying and covert operations in the 1960s.
Kennedy was killed during a visit to Dallas. As his motorcade finished its parade route downtown, shots rang out from the Texas School Book Depository building. Police arrested Oswald, who had positioned himself from a sniper’s perch on the sixth floor. Two days later, nightclub owner Jack Ruby fatally shot Oswald during a jail transfer broadcast live on television.
The latest release of documents pumped new energy into conspiracy theories about the assassination. Kennedy scholars said they haven’t seen anything out of line with the conclusion that Oswald, an ex-Marine, was the lone gunman.
“The chase for the truth will go on forever, I suspect,” said Philip Shenon, who wrote a 2013 book about the killing of JFK.
The vast majority of the National Archives’ collection of more than six million related pages of records, photographs, motion pictures, sound recordings and artefacts had already been released before the archives posted about 2,200 files online.
Writers, historians and conspiracy promoters have spent decades pushing for the release of all the records. In the early 1990s, the federal government mandated that all assassination-related documents be housed in a single collection in the National Archives and Records Administration. The collection was required to be opened by 2017, barring any exemptions designated by the president.
According to researchers and the FBI, roughly 3,700 files held by federal authorities still haven’t been released. Trump’s order also called for declassifying the remaining federal records related to the 1968 assassinations of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
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Scholars and history buffs described the latest release as rushed and expressed frustration that going through the files one by one represented a random search for unreleased information.
“We’ve all heard the reports about the lawyers staying up all night, which I believe, because there’s a lot of sloppiness in this,” said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics and author of The Kennedy Half-Century.
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