MINNEAPOLIS (KFGO) - A federal judge from Minnesota says it's time for the government to release the remainder of its records connected to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
The National Archives is scheduled to unveil about 3,000 never-before-seen documents before Oct. 26. In 1992, Congress mandated the documents' release in 25 years unless President Trump orders that they remain sealed.
Chief U.S. District Judge John Tunheim was chairman of the JFK Assassination Records Review Board. In an interview with KFGO News, Tunhem said that he hopes the records can finally be seen by everyone.
“I think it’s time to release everything” Tunheim said. “We didn’t really protect that much. We never protected an entire document, except for those that we didn’t think that were relevant at all. It might have been some kind of intelligence gathering method that was still being used that they didn’t want the public to know about.”
“Part of the problem through the years is that so much information was protected, which led to so many gaps in the story” according to Tunheim. “Gaps are often filled by plausible explanations – and a lot of plausible explanations pointed to conspiracies."
Tunheim says Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he assassinated Kennedy, but he says at least one conspiracy may deserve closer scrutiny. “Among all the conspiracy theories, if there’s any that deserve closer examination over time, it’s the idea that organized crime may have played some role, but having said that, there is very little evidence that’s direct and points that way.”
Tunheim says he thinks the Trump Administration “likely will allow all the releases to occur unless there’s some type of appeal from the CIA or the FBI concerning certain records.”
About 30,000 additional records "not considered relevant" to the assassination could also be released. Tunheim says it's unlikely that any big surprises will be found, but he says materials considered irrelevant in the past may be seen in a different light today.