EDITORIAL: Feds still sit on JFK files

This year marked 59 years since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It also marked the 30th anniversary of the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, which gave the government until Oct. 26, 2017, to declassify its files about the event.

Former President Donald Trump had multiple opportunities to declassify the files but chose to release only a small, heavily redacted portion, bowing to pressure from the intelligence community to take advantage of the law’s provision that allows the president to withhold — and review at a later date — any of the documents on national security grounds.

The last time Mr. Trump had an opportunity to release all of the documents, he announced he wouldn’t do so because “continued withholdings are necessary to protect against identifiable harm to national security, law enforcement or foreign affairs.” This month, President Joe Biden followed Mr. Trump’s lead and released more — but not all — of the classified pages devoted to one of our nation’s darkest days.

As NBC News reports, about 98 percent of all documents related to the assassination have now been released, according to the National Archives, which controls the collection. That leaves roughly 4,300 records still redacted in part, with no record completely blacked out. Many outside experts say there’s no reason for withholding them to protect national security or intelligence gathering.

So what’s the holdup? Why have two presidents refused to release all of them?

According to Jesse Walker of Reason, who has written a book about the JFK assassination, speculation ranges from the potentially incriminating nature of some of the documents to the government simply “waiting for a couple of old CIA guys to die.” Mr. Walker also cites MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, who says, “It seems like (the feds) released all the records we needed to see — except the records we needed to see.”

As Mr. Walker has also noted, you don’t have to be a kook to recognize that the JFK assassination is a hugely significant historical event that still has several questions around it. Most of the vast conspiracy theories involving the tragedy have been debunked as fiction, but a government that continues to sit on information only fuels the fire. Polls show that only about a quarter of Americans believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

It has been almost 60 years. The idea that secrecy remains vital to the nation’s national security is a stretch. A more likely explanation for the delays is that some of the remaining files might be embarrassing to the government or certain reputations.

That’s not a good enough reason for secrecy. President Biden should release the documents.