Congress Ordered Every JFK File Open in 25 Years. A Loophole Kept Thousands Shut.
The 1992 law promised full disclosure by 2017, but an identifiable-harm exception let the government ask to hold back about 15,000 documents.
Who Killed JFK? · Withheld Documents [BONUS]In 1992, Congress tried to end arguments about President John F. Kennedy's assassination by ordering openness on a timer. Every federal agency that held records about the killing would send them to the National Archives, and after 25 years, on October 26, 2017, they would all become public.
The law contained one exception. A president could keep a record secret longer by certifying that disclosure would cause identifiable harm, the kind of damage to intelligence, law enforcement, or foreign relations that outweighed the public interest in release.
Between 2017 and 2018, more than 34,000 records were released. But the exception swallowed much of the deadline. Jefferson Morley, a researcher who follows the files, said the CIA went to President Donald Trump in 2017 and said it could not possibly release all of the remaining records, and Trump's CIA director, Mike Pompeo, backed that request.
The government asked to continue withholding about 15,000 documents, about 11,000 of them CIA records. On April 26, 2018, Trump gave agencies until April 26, 2021, to review the rest and decide whether secrecy was still necessary.
That number stunned the people who had built the system. Morley said officials who had run the records process had expected that perhaps 100 records would still need protection in 2017, not 15,000. "So the CIA took that loophole in the law, and they drove a giant truckload of documents through it," he said.
A law that set a 25-year deadline ended up with continued secrecy because the final call went to the president, and Trump accepted the CIA's request and gave agencies until April 2021 to keep reviewing the records.
Questions people ask
How many JFK records are public, and how many are still secret?
More than 34,000 records were released in 2017 and 2018, while the government asked to keep about 15,000 back, about 11,000 of them CIA records. That remainder is the focus of the continuing fight, with documents withheld in full or released with blacked-out sections.
What counts as 'identifiable harm'?
It means specific, describable damage from disclosure, such as exposing a living intelligence source, revealing how spies are recruited, or harming relations with a foreign government. Under the law, the president had to conclude that the harm was serious enough to outweigh the public interest in knowing what happened in 1963.
Was Congress expecting secrecy to continue after 2017?
Under the original law, no. The 25-year clock was supposed to be the end, with only narrow exceptions certified by the president. Later presidential decisions extended the review period, and critics argue that turned a final deadline into an open-ended process.