The perpetual hunt for clues about the 20th century’s most dissected political assassination — the shooting of President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas — took a turn Tuesday with the release of more than 31,000 pages from the National Archives. The dissemination of the records, ordered by President Trump, is the latest in a string of disclosures since the 1990s that have tweaked how the nation and historians view Kennedy’s killing. The vast majority of the National Archives’ 6 million pages of records related to the murder has already been declassified. The newest batch of records can be found on the agency’s webpage under the headline, “JFK Assassination Records - 2025 Documents Release.” A Washington Post analysis shows that, none of the files released Tuesday are new. But many of the redactions have been unmasked.
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Most of the National Archives’ online records related to the assassination are available on the website of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, named after a Dallas legal secretary who became one of the earliest researchers into the assassination. “Every time they do this, people discover interesting things that fill out the story,” said Rex Bradford, president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation. “The saga of the Kennedy assassination is one revelation after another revelation. It’s an unpeeling of history at the height of the Cold War and, for that reason alone, it’s interesting, even apart from the assassination.” Jefferson Morley, the foundation’s vice president, hopes the records shed new light on the events leading to JFK’s assassination, including his mistrust of the CIA, the surveillance of gunman Lee Harvey Oswald in Mexico City, and propaganda operations involving Oswald before and after JFK was killed. Philip Shenon, author of “A Cruel and Shocking Act,” a history of the assassination, said that after scanning numerous documents in the latest release, he struggled to find much that altered his understanding of the killing. Many pages are difficult to read and filled with a litany of names and pseudonyms whose significance is not yet known—and may never be. “We’ve seen virtually all of these documents before with redactions, but I can’t instantly tell you what’s new,” he said. “It’s always possible there is a blockbuster, but so far, nothing here on the face of it is rewriting the essential truth of what happened that day. It would take days, weeks and months for a serious researcher to really understand what’s in these documents.”