When Donald Trump ordered the declassification of thousands of secret government documents on the assassination of president John F Kennedy, it looked like it would be a red letter day for America’s conspiracy theorists. The reality has been rather different. The JFK files – as well as other documents about the killings of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, which were released on Tuesday – look like a very damp squib.
These documents lead to more questions than answers
Around 2,000 documents were included in the release from the US National Archives and Records Administration. But despite Trump’s insistence that the files should not be redacted, many still have passages blacked out. Others are so faded or imperfectly photocopied as to be illegible.
The files contain memos from the CIA that describe how a KGB official had reviewed volumes of files on JFK’s killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, and were ‘confident’ that he was not an intelligence asset.
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