Still waiting for all the JFK files

Warren Commission's Magic Bullet theory

Hard to believe that those who conspired to kill President Kennedy haven't already sanitized government files of any incriminating evidence. But why the continuous fiddling about releasing all the files?

From WHAT’S BURIED IN THE MISSING JFK DOCUMENTS?:

...According to the JFK Records Release Act, passed by Congress and signed into law by George H.W. Bush in 1992, all still-classified documents related to the assassination of JFK were to be made public in full by October 26, 2017 — unless the president personally decided that certain documents posed such a risk to national security that their continued suppression outweighed the public good of disclosure.

There was great anticipation leading up to the deadline — researchers and enthusiasts had been waiting 25 years to see these documents. NARA helped pump up the excitement with an early release of a small batch of documents in July. And President Donald Trump seemed to allay fears that he might succumb to pressure from the intelligence community to withhold documents; a series of presidential tweets appeared to indicate that the scheduled release was on track.

But that didn’t happen. Come the day of the deadline, the White House explained that the various agencies needed time — six months’ worth — to “re-review” all of the records to make sure that national security was not at risk...

The various agencies involved — CIA, FBI, State Department, and others — were given until April 26, 2018, to determine how much of the redacted material would need to remain so.

“The National Archives’ commendable efforts to make the new records available online notwithstanding, overall the release process has been disappointing and disheartening,” Rex Bradford — president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, which hosts one of the premiere sites for searchable, online JFK documents — told WhoWhatWhy.

“The amount of continued withholding by the CIA and other agencies — including huge stretches of whited-out pages in newly released records — is beyond anything remotely like that contemplated under the JFK Records Act. And the process itself has been marred by abundant errors and moving targets.”

But back in late October, John Greenewald of the Black Vault filed a FOIA request seeking the number of still-withheld documents at that time. He finally received a response in late January from NARA’s Office of General Counsel:

We conducted a search and were able to locate an EXCEL spreadsheet that lists everything that has not been released since December 15th, 2017 (the last release date). We are releasing this document [in] full with no redactions. The spreadsheet lists the JFK record number, the decision, the file number, document date, number of pages, and the origination agency.

The list contains 22,933 record numbers. When comparing it to NARA’s master spreadsheet of 2017 releases, it appears that the majority of files on the FOIA list were already made public last year. So “not been released” includes all of the many files that were in fact released in 2017, but with redactions, and are now awaiting the final review deadline in April.

Curiously however, there are 2,901 files listed that are not on NARA’s spreadsheet. That’s certainly a much larger number than the 86 files NARA mentioned in December. WhoWhatWhy has created a spreadsheet detailing these files....