The JFK files will infuriate conspiracy theorists

When Donald Trump ordered the declassification of thousands of secret government documents on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, it seemed like it would be a red-letter day for America’s conspiracy theorists. The reality has been quite different. The JFK files — along with other documents about the killings of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., which were released on Tuesday — have turned out to be a major disappointment.

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 blacked-out passages. Others are so faded or poorly photocopied that they are illegible.

The files include CIA memos describing how a KGB official reviewed volumes of files on JFK’s killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, and was “confident” that he was not an intelligence asset. Another document claims that Oswald communicated with a KGB officer in the months leading up to the assassination. But those hoping for a smoking gun in the files will be disappointed — these documents raise more questions than they answer.

As a result, this batch of redacted documents is more likely to fuel accusations of a deep-state conspiracy rather than solve the mysteries surrounding the Kennedy and King assassinations more than 60 years later. Over the decades, polls have shown that many Americans believe the men arrested for the Kennedy and King assassinations did not act alone and that the government was somehow involved.

You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to feel that something was suspicious about the killing of the young and charismatic President Kennedy, who was gunned down in Dallas, Texas, by a sniper (or snipers) in November 1963. Oswald, a former US Marine marksman, was arrested for Kennedy’s murder after he shot and killed a Dallas police officer, JD Tippit, within hours of the assassination. Oswald himself was then shot dead on live TV while in police custody by Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner with ties to organized crime.

Oswald had previously defected to Russia at the height of the Cold War, had a Russian wife, and was reportedly a pro-communist activist defending Fidel Castro’s Cuba — a regime Kennedy had tried and failed to overthrow.

Before he was killed, Oswald claimed he was a “patsy” set up by shadowy figures responsible for Kennedy’s assassination. There were credible reports of other gunmen being seen around the famous “grassy knoll” in Dallas’s Dealey Plaza, where Kennedy was shot. The number and trajectory of the bullets that hit him became a key part of the growing conspiracy theories.

To put such theories to rest, Kennedy’s successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson (who was in Dallas at the time and was even accused by some of orchestrating the assassination) established a commission led by Chief Justice Earl Warren to conduct a full investigation and produce a definitive report on the murder.

However, the Warren Report — rushed to publication — was riddled with inaccuracies. Rather than settling the matter, it only fueled suspicions among those who doubted its conclusion that Oswald was the lone gunman.

Beyond Russia and Cuba, the most commonly accused parties in the assassination are the Mafia, which was angered by the Kennedy brothers’ war on organized crime, and the CIA, which allegedly blamed the Kennedys for the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and for being “soft on communism.”

When it was revealed that Oswald had contact with government officials and shady figures linked to the Mob and CIA during a visit to Mexico shortly before the assassination, theories of a deep-state plot gained traction. But America’s trauma was far from over. In 1968, the nation was rocked by the assassinations of Dr. King (who, like Kennedy, was shot by a sniper — this time on a motel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee) and JFK’s brother, Senator Bobby Kennedy (who was fatally shot in a Los Angeles hotel after winning the California primary).

King’s killer, a white supremacist named James Earl Ray, fled to Britain but was arrested at Heathrow Airport as riots swept across the US in response to King’s murder. Ray died in prison in 1998 while serving a 99-year sentence. Bobby Kennedy’s assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian man who allegedly shot him at point-blank range due to the senator’s support for Israel, remains in prison, where he has been visited by Trump’s former Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

So far, no shocking new revelations have emerged from the examination of the partially redacted documents released this week. Still, Trump has at least fulfilled his promise to release the JFK files. With an estimated 80,000 documents still to go through — and in an era where few people trust what the government says — the conspiracy theorists will have plenty to keep them busy for the foreseeable future.