Thousands of top secret JFK assassination documents could become public next week

A 1992 law set a deadline of Oct. 26, 2017, for the president to decide whether or not to unseal the 3,600 top-secret files about the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy. The decision, then, falls on President Trump to determine if the documents should be made public. Alternately, he could seal them away if he certifies that they would cause "an identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations [that] outweighs the public interest in disclosure," BuzzFeed News reports.

Rep. Walter Jones (R-N.C.) has introduced a House bill urging Trump to allow the documents about the 1963 assassination to be released. "Obviously it's hard for me to believe that there wasn't a certain amount of complicity in all this development," said Jones. "I don't know about the second shooter, I still have questions about whether there was a second shooter or not, I think maybe there could have been, I don't know. This might help me find out. But I do think there were people behind [shooter Lee Harvey] Oswald, I have no question about that."

In the Senate, Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) sponsored a bill that mirrored Jones'. It is cosponsored by Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy (Vt.) who said: "Americans have the right to know what our government knows."

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

In the spring, Judge John R. Tunheim, the former chairman of the Assassination Records Review Board, said he knew of "no bombshells" in the papers. Murphy added: "I will say this: This collection is really interesting as a snapshot of the Cold War." Read more about Congress' effort to make the papers public at BuzzFeed News and more about what could be in the documents at The Dallas Morning News.