1,491 documents on John F. Kennedy's assassination released
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John F. Kennedy’s assassination is one that still shakes US politics to its core.
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Picture of President Kennedy in the limousine in Dallas, Texas, on Main Street, minutes before the assassination.
The US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) announced on Wednesday the release of 1,491 newly declassified records related to the assassination of former US President John F. Kennedy.
In a press release, the National Archives said that "in accordance with President [Joe] Biden's directive of October 22, 2021, the National Archives today posted 1,491 documents subject to the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992."
The US government will continue to review 14,000 previously withheld records over the next year to determine if any additional records should be made available to the public; however, certain records will be withheld if there is a strong reason to do so, according to the release.
On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, sparking a frenzy of a public inquiry. Several investigations concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald fired the shots, and he was apprehended shortly after the murder. Two days later, he was shot while being escorted to a car that was supposed to take him to the county jail by Jack Ruby, the owner of a Dallas club. In the decades since the events, a plethora of conspiracy theories has emerged in an attempt to explain the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald.
The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 required the NARA to release the entire collection to the public in exactly 25 years, which was on October 26, 2017, unless the US president determined that doing so would jeopardize national security or current foreign relations.
Since then, the national archivist has made available to the public more than 250,000 records relating to Kennedy's assassination, accounting for more than 90 percent of its collection.
