New JFK files say allegations of CIA ties to Oswald are 'totally unfounded'

Lee Harvey Oswald
(Image credit: Stringer/Getty Images)

A new batch of formerly classified files pertaining to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was released Friday, among them a 1975 CIA memo which says allegations of the agency's connection to assassin Lee Harvey Oswald are "totally unfounded." The memo describes a fruitless search of CIA and other federal agency records to see if Oswald was linked in "any conceivable way," The Associated Press reports.

Friday's document dump also unexpectedly included information about Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. A 1968 FBI document, which does not mention JFK, accuses King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference of financial misconduct and King himself of communism and marital infidelity. As Newsweek notes, it "is not clear if any of the information in the dossier was verified," or why the document has been released with the JFK collection.

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.