By Tim Binnall
A research group has filed a lawsuit against the federal government in the hopes of forcing the release of a slew of files related to the JFK assassination which have been maddeningly kept secret for decades. Spearheading the legal action, which was reportedly launched on Wednesday, is an organization known as the Mary Ferrell Foundation, which serves as a massive online clearinghouse for materials related to "the assassinations of the 1960s, the Watergate scandal, and post-Watergate intelligence abuse investigations." At issue for the group is what they see as a frustrating refusal by the federal government to follow through on a 1992 law which should have seen all remaining records concerning the JFK assassination released to the public by October of 2017.
When the appointed time finally arrived, however, then-President Trump issued an order to withhold a sizeable portion of the materials due to national security concerns. The release of the files was further delayed last October when President Biden put forward a similar decree which called for the remaining 16,000 files to undergo an "intensive one year review" to determine what, if any, redactions to the documents might be warranted. Although the order indicated that the approved materials should ultimately be released to the public no later than December 15th of this yea, the Mary Ferrell Foundation's lawsuit argues that the process has dragged on far too long and that the two presidential actions are not in compliance with the 1992 law.
Specifically suing President Biden and the National Archives, the group is asking a judge to strike down the 2021 executive order and immediately release the remaining files. The organization's action is seemingly an attempt to get ahead of what they suspect will be further delays from the government agencies who possess these materials and will, again, cite national security concerns for keeping the information hidden. Intriguingly, the lawsuit also requests that the National Archives procure additional tangential assassination files that are "known to exist but that are not part of the JFK Collection," which may be of interest to historians.
While it is widely believed that these remaining materials do not contain a proverbial 'smoking gun' which will solve the JFK assassination once and for all, researchers believe that they may feature nuggets of information that could reveal more about the circumstances surrounding the tragic event. They also posit that the need for secrecy surrounding these files has decreased considerably since the assassination so long ago. Lending his support to the lawsuit, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. mused that "the law requires the records be released. It's bizarre. It's been almost 60 years since my uncle's death. What are they hiding?"