The National Archives within the next two weeks will release thousands of never-before-seen government documents related to President John F. Kennedy's assassination, but two national experts on the topic write in Politico Magazine the disclosure could be a fiasco.
More than 3,000 never-before-seen documents from the FBI, CIA, and Justice Department are set to be released, along with 30,000 that have only been partially released in the past. The document dump "will simply fuel a new generation of conspiracy theories," write Philip Shenon and Larry J. Sabato.
Sabato is the director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics and author of "The Kennedy Half-Century" and Shenon is a former reporter for the New York Times and author of, "A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination."
Congress mandated in 1992 that all assassination documents be released within 25 years, unless President Donald Trump says that doing so would harm foreign relations, law enforcement, intelligence or military operations. The Archives will release the documents between now and the Oct. 26 deadline, but doing so could be chaotic.
"We both published books in 2013 about the assassination and had a taste of the chaos to come back in July, when the Archives tried an online release of a relatively small portion of the secret documents, including about 400 never-before-seen files," write Sabato and Shenon. "The Archives computer servers were instantly overwhelmed, making it impossible to download any of the material for days."
The CIA is urging President Donald Trump to delay disclosing some of the files for another 25 years according to friend and political adviser Roger Stone but the National Archives would not say whether any agencies have appealed the release of the documents.
"They must reflect badly on the CIA even though virtually everyone involved is long dead," Stone said in a statement on his website.
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